A Chromatic Scale

It's the summer holidays and so I haven't been at the bookshop, instead have been drifting and doing kind of the same things and kind of other things, in a looser schedule.

For one thing, the spare time is a nudge to work on the piano again. Today and yesterday I sightread some of the piano part for Beethoven's Emperor concerto No. 4. It went better than last time because it is difficult to get into the mood; the piano bit is more scrappy and subordinated to the orchestra than in some other concerts. It's especially rewarding in a way, though, because the recognizable, relaxed, and lovely pieces of melody come at unexpected moments, especially after the most tedious scale or repetitive broken chords or a difficult trill that persists like an angry and troubling bumblebee. (Which can also happen with Mozart when, in a compositional device my father likes to point out, a chromatic scale leads haphazardly back to the original key. Chromatic scales run up or down in half notes; I think that they have a meandering character because they pause by the sharps and flats and therefore draw out the run, or a scurrying character because the additional sharps and flats render them more frenzied. Inventing dumb or obvious miniature stories about scales is the way I've developed to convince myself that they have meaning and that I can love them.) It is nicest of all when it is an endearing earlier motif which I thought had been extinguished forever.

There are two cadenzas to the concerto in the back of the score. The first made no sense to me yesterday but I should try again, and the second is the one I seem to have heard in recordings. Today I made up ones of my own as I went along, because even if I don't have much of a method or book-instruction yet I must start figuring out improvisation at some point.

By the time I had gone through Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Chopin's Raindrop Prelude and Revolutionary Etude, etc., I was tired.