2. Theme from Second Movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5

This A^♭ major key signature doesn't seem daunting, since the John Thompson series has you playing in keys of up to 4 sharps / flats as early as the first grade book. It does provide a new orientation for my fingers though, and was quite a bit challenging at first. After spending about four or five days already on the really challenging parts, I can already feel my fingers relaxing in A^♭ major, and I don't want to forget the effort it took to get there. I'm glad I started this blog because it's for documenting precisely these moments of transition. 

Starting out, I sight-read (and then simply read) through the first section. Over and over I did this, as many times as I play a section during practice sessions, and I continued this method for two days. I had to resist memorising it, but it worked and I became kinda good at reading the text. At least that part. I did it again to a lesser degree for the rest of the piece, but once I got to the second section the fingering became harder and I opted to memorise faster so I could focus on getting the arpeggios comfortably under my fingers. Will talk about those soon. For now, here's a picture of the first iteration of the main refrain. I think this is what J. T. refers to in his discourse on the simplicity that makes this song genius. In fact, he uses the phrase "utter simplicity and purity," remarking on how unnecessary it was for Beethoven to bolster the melody with any elaborate accompaniment or chords.

The simple melody begins in the opening picture, passes through the second pic and ends with this one (left). J. T. excerpts pretty much the same passages, and then goes on to show how the development remains simple by the mere addition of triplets at first as a contrast and then a support to the dotted quaver-semiquaver pattern in the first picture. He advocates applying a similar level of simplicity to the interpretation of the piece.

The triplets really become dominant in the passage beginning with the bars pictured right. This is the section I found most difficult. These triplets are mainly broken chords and arpeggios—here in A^♭ major but later (as in the bottom-right picture) in C. I found my fingers needed to build up their stability in order to remain comfortable on their black-note perches. It took about four days to get over the brunt of the awkwardness and stop feeling like my fingers were at any moment going to slip off the blacks and crash onto the whites. I remember spending a whole session practising these bars and the three that follow—approximately two hours of just this to the exclusion of all other pieces. (In any given practice session, I usually visit several of my older pieces in addition to the one I'm learning.) It's interesting how the facility I have playing chords in pretty much all keys doesn't quite translate to the arpeggios. I'm very very bad about practising arpeggios and am glad now to be forced into doing it. When I finally felt comfortable enough to move on to the second of the sections pictured above-right, I had to practice that for a long time too—not quite as long as the previous section, but a good half-hour maybe of just CE-G-C, together with the right-hand notes, of course. It's not intuitive (if fingers can be said to have intuition) to hold CE with 5th and 4th fingers of the left hand and then keep the C held while the E-G-C is repeated arpeggio style. That 4th finger doesn't want to part with its pinky friend. The right hand has its problems, too, shifting between 1-5 and 2-5 and spanning quite a few notes between those second and fifth fingers. It's not the spanning that's difficult, though, but the accuracy of the shifting. I actually like that section where I span an octave with the right hand, holding the sixth and eighth notes of the scale with my third and fifth fingers and the thumb on the tonic. I dunno why, but it feels kinda good to travel down the keyboard like that. See the final bar of the second picture (above right).  I should note that the song experiences a key change in this section too, but it's done via modulation rather than by an explicit key-signature change. See all those naturals? They accomplish it. It feels like you're just playing in C major at this point.

This picture shows a long octave run that ends with one of those 1-3-5 octaves I mentioned before. I really like the way the right hand slides off the Fs and onto Gs with that E held with the middle finger. It's pretty slick, and all the way at the other end of the keyboard, the left hand's playing another G-octave. Look at how it travels down there: it jumps from middle-F# to the A^♭ octave just above, then jumps another octave to A^♭ again, and then slips down onto the G's at the same time as the right hand. A bit later both hands travel back down that way to hold the three lowest C's. It creates a nice little thud, and the contrast with the higher notes previously played is definitely marked even though these notes sound softer. For the rumble of the lowest C penetrates the way bass notes tend to: you almost feel rather than hear it.

To the right we have a return to the opening motive, but here all the gaps are filled in and the timing is regularized to six semiquavers per measure. It was easier to learn because it's built on a pattern I'd learned in the opening bars. It just involved marking which notes were repeated or added to fill in the spaces of the earlier passage. The later measures do deviate from the pattern, though, as Beethoven tacked on few more bars of melody as variation and, as a result, carved out a new and intriguing path to the refrain. It involves those grace notes pictured bottom right. I like playing those with the fingering J. T. worked out. I learned that 4-3 acciaccatura all the way back in Toreador Song, and it's served me well in The Skaters, Boccherini's Minuet, Hungarian Rhapsodie No. 2, and now here. (It tripped me up in La Styrienne, though, where it needed to go in the other direction: 3-4.) This section is a bit Baroque-like, but of course not polyphonic, as the melody line is in the right hand. Note the requirement to play molto legato, softly, and sweetly throughout.  I like that. 

Since the end is a return to the theme of the beginning, it necessarily travels to the terminus reached in its first iteration. So, yeah we've seen these chords before.

Finally, a random pic from somewhere in the middle.

RH octave melody

Alan Chan's rendition

1. The Juggler

The Juggler is the first song in the fourth grade book and, as J. T. said, the progress between each book truly is unbroken because learning this felt like simply moving on to a new song, not to an entirely new book! In fact, all things considered, it was easier than Hymn to the Sun, since it's basically one big arpeggio in G major. Well... of course it's more than that. The lesson it provides is in sharing figures between the hands, and the arpeggios are to be played as though they were being done by just one hand. The name "juggler" is apt, since the semiquaver duos are thrown back and forth and the notes of the arpeggio appear in a regular G-major cycle, with the left hand picking up the notes the right hand has just dropped off—as though you were really juggling G-B-D-G! The opening typifies this: the slurs cover the entire 4 notes of the broken G chord and spans both staves.

The phrase ends with a flourish in the right hand, which should be indistinguishable from the rest if judged by the sound alone, since the smoothness shouldn't be broken at all. This part, I remember, took some practice to get right. I had to change the fingering a bit: I had to use my third finger on that F meant to be executed with the second finger. That way, my pinky gets to A in time to perform that group of four semiquavers with the appropriate smoothness. The gap between the G and D was, at first, an impediment to the desired smoothness, but I'm getting there.

Pictured left is a section in which the hands trade two-note slurs of contrasting slopes, and in which the motion they make is that of a lemniscate. It takes practice to get them to work together with the correct timing, but once it happens I think the execution will be as beautiful to view as it is to hear.

The lead-in to the end has us performing a variation on that flourish described above—several in quick succession, building on different tones of the home key, and shared between the hands. It leads into some broken seventh chords played in inversion (not pictured) and then finally to an exact repeat of the above group of notes (pictured lower left). Interestingly, that middle group of semiquavers have their stems pointing downward this time. Not at all sure why the difference. And what's up with that double stemmed semiquaver to the right of them and resting on G? The stems seem to be indicating a dual relationship: one shared with the A across the bar line on its left, the other shared with the semiquaver groups to its right. This resolves into another train of arpeggios, ascending to the song's final chords: D-G (below).

 







Alan Chan's rendition

Redux: November 11, 2016
Worked a bit on this today. There's a lot more fluidity in the G major arpeggio, but still some trouble with the left hand jump down to the D7 in measure 4. I find that it's easier to remember the notes, but I'm not sure that I'm working from muscular memory of the song itself, or just from general muscle memory gained from playing technical patterns, like scales. Either way, I guess it's good. I'll still have to work a bit to get it memorised fluently and played fluidly, but at least my hands already know how to make the notes sound cantabile. 

34. Hymn to the Sun

Dissonance as melody is the hallmark of Rimsky-Korsakov's Hymn to the Sun. This isn't my first time playing chromatic passages, but this is definitely the first text in which it was the focus instead of a mere path connecting two harmonic passages. Memorisation? Not likely, though I think it would be possible. I tried memorizing this first section on my first real day of playing it, and it was working out almost as well as any other session, albeit with my having to deal with unintuitive relationships between successive pitches and not really being able to use that as a mnemonic device. I bet it's a good song for developing aural skills: intervals and such.

A friend telephoned while I sight-read (for the second or third time) an especially atonal portion of this text, much like the one pictured right. I was never so happy to be interrupted in my life. (Actually, I'm overstating it. I was actually thinking: please, let me just get through this phrase...) But I wasn't very motivated to return to it. At the end of the call, I thought, Tomorrow.... I'm still waiting for tomorrow, 48 hrs later. This section is indeed dissonant, but I was exaggerating when I called it atonal. It's actually quite harmonic in a weirdly dissonant way. The harmonies are themselves climbing by semitones, so its got a strange slithery feel to it, like the creepy / creeping motion of a serpent.

The text pictured left occurs at the point at which the chromatic section of the song's opening leads into a harmonic section. Notice how the melodic voice splits in two halfway through the bar. That split occurs at the moment of transition between introduction and harmonic development. I think. The song develops a key signature somewhere around here, too. It begins in C, though as a chromatic passage, C was just convenient for the sake of notation. It was in all keys or no key at all, which amounts to the same thing. It switches to A major at the beginning of the fifth bar. Below (left) is an excerpt of the harmonic section. Looks normal, don't it?

I didn't really try to play those sextets to the right as fast as they should be played, but I noted them, and it's cool that they're there. Below that is a return to chromaticism, but these come as grace notes: 12 of them shared between the hands. I'd just seen a passage like this in Hungarian Rhapsodie 2 in which there were 14 notes shared between hands, so this wasn't too surprising. Liszt's beats this in length; this beats Liszt's in sheer weirdness. I guess you can't have it all...

The song ends harmonically: with two A major chords executed an octave apart. It's a pretty satisfying conclusion, and unexpected, considering how the song started out. Finishing this song meant I'd finished the book! I was pretty excited and noted the time: 14:01 PDT on Friday, 13th of March 2015. I was pretty pumped. Of course, I still needed to play it a few more times, as I noted above, but all in all, I'd played my way through Rimsky-Korsakov and made history for myself all in an afternoon. Pretty cool!

Alan Chan's rendition

33. Curious Story

This piece is an etude by Stephen Heller, and J. T. says its purpose is to help students work on velocity. In keeping with this, the song isn't very hard to learn or to execute. I have problems with a couple sections, but in general the whole is designed to be easy enough to play so that one can focus on the speed of the fingers. (Coming up in the Fourth Grade Book is Il Penderoso, which also provides a velocity workout using modified arpeggios, so I think J. T. finds Heller's studies in general to be useful.) I'm thinking of learning Curious Story really well and keeping it in my repertoire precisely for practising speed. I know I need to work on my arpeggios, and there is a section of this text (we'll see) that contains them and would give me that needed practice.

I notice that J.T.'s own composition Tarantella is similar in sound to this piece, and I think it helped prepare me in such a way that learning this song seemed a lot easier. This opening (right) shows the triplets that are characteristic of the text, and Tarantella was similarly based on triplets. Here, however, the triplets give way far more frequently to quaver-semiquaver beams. This (for me) always begs the question of the difference between the triplet with the missing middle note and those (semi)quaver complexes. I believe I raised this question in Serenade as well. Every time I think I have it figured out, something comes along to make the distinction murky again. The math makes the difference clear, of course: one's divided into thirds, the other into fourths. But that difference of 1/12 is so elusive! [da-(u)-di vs da~ah-(u)-di?] Anyway, this is the main theme of the song and it's got some variations, which I will presently discuss.

Top left we have a denser harmonic accompaniment added to the main melody, but this does more than just add harmonies. It also modifies the text by raising some of the pitches along the way. B-flat is naturalized and G is sharpened, for instance. I'm not sure if these and other changes add up to an expression of D-minor in one of its forms. Melodic, probably. Looks more like an implied E major or G#m. But it could also be some exotic scale that I haven't learned yet, like Dorian or Phrygian (or some other term that sounds like it belongs in Aristotle's Poetics.) Below that is a neat thirds section that I've already begun to be able to play pretty fast. Oh for the day my speed on the rest of the sections finally catch up!

The text pictured right is a strange, slowing and dissonant section, which provides another good velocity workout because the semiquaver thirds double the already significant speed. It also provides a good exercise in finger control, because the second and third fingers, used to playing trills or fully consecutive passages in both directions, tend to want to play another C after that final B-flat (right hand). I have to force my fingers not to do that, and it's good for them. The C actually does get played, but not for another two beats, and the B is held for the duration.

Pictured top left is a slightly chromatic section that begins with the right hand leaping over an octave and then ends with both hands playing a dissonant melody in unison. This repeats again in C. The second is another triplet section that requires some fast hopping down the keyboard. These triplet groups are consecutive, but the next two following have a larger gap between the groups as this pattern simply repeats in a lower octave. A similar thing happens at the end of the song (bottom right pic), where two arpeggios (in F and C) are played in a specific pattern and then repeated twice in lower octaves. I've been working to get that part especially even and fluid, and its been improving so far. This is a song I'd definitely like to keep working on until I can play all the sections as fast as J. T. and Heller intended.

Alan Chan's rendition

32. Minuet in G

Simplicity is the name of the game for Beethoven, it seems. I'm about to play another song by him that's also all about the simplicity of the theme. However, there's nothing simple about the fingering for the theme of this minuet. The alternation between finger groups 3-5, 2-4 and 1-5 is a little unorthodox and awkward, at least at first, and especially because of the way the second and fourth fingers have to sort of climb over the third and fifth to reach the A# and C#. And it is a little weird curving the hand inward to play B and D with 1-5, since the fingers are so far apart and the two notes so close together. But it works, and the hand has to fit itself to the music, right?

The section that follows has a very similar rhythm (not surprisingly), but with wider dyads that share the thumb between them. It's less awkward to execute than the opening and this is where we find an interesting chord progression in the left hand that sounds pretty awesome. See that F-natural octave in the middle of the second bar? It's the dominant 7th and leads from the tonic G to the C chord that follows. It was a familiar sound, and I was glad to see it in practice in a classical piece.

Next comes the polyphonic section that reminded me of Bach. It's interesting how closely Beethoven's era followed upon Bach's and yet how far apart they were in style. He's considered Romantic, like Liszt and Chopin, yet he's pretty close to Mozart in age and era. Mozart was born six years after J.S. Bach died and was about 14 when Beethoven was born. Give them a couple decades or so to grow and develop and in about 50 years we go through two periods. Still, the influences are apparent. This section provides a bit more work on hand independence... kind of. Actually, it was perhaps better as reading material since the notes actually follow the same path in each hand. You could say their derivatives are the same in every direction, so they pretty much work together. But there were other bars with other opportunities for hand and finger work.

Here's a perplexing bit. I can't quite figure out the difference (in sound) between these two passage. There is none really; the difference concerns the song's overall configuration. The first iteration leads directly back into some earlier passage that started on an upbeat of quaver length, so that's why there's no need to fill in the missing rest to complete the bar. The second one leads into the song's beginning passage that starts with an upbeat of crotchet length, and it has to wait out bar before moving on to that. So the difference is pretty simple to explain, but I do remember being initially perplexed and having to think about it. 

Alan Chan's rendition

31. Prelude in C Minor

The difficulty of this song hit me when I tried to hold the first two chords. Never had my fingers stretched so much, especially in the right hand. The stretching of the notes across the staves is symbolic of the effect of the music on your hands: extended lines translate directly to stressed ligaments. The first bar was indeed difficult, though after having played through the whole song and been through its rigours, its difficult for me to recall what was so bad about it. However, I do remember having to step away from the song for a day or so just to let my hands recuperate. And this was while I was on only the third beat of the bar! Okay... to be precise, I had been previewing the song ahead of time, so "stepping away" might just really have meant I was happy to revert to my real piece and leave this song for another day.

I had no such excuse when it came time to really work on this piece. I averaged a bar a day, not just because of the difficulties holding the chords (though, as we will see, these were considerable), but also because each chord was in itself kind of a full bar's worth of work. It took so much of my cognition to memorize the placements of the fingers that I could only handle memorizing one bar at a time. 

Take a look at the third beat of the second bar (right). Unbelievable! Chopin wants us to hold both D-flat and E-flat with the thumb, jam the second finger between two black keys to hit G and then stretch over the rest of that group of blacks and into a nook to hit C, and finally cotch up the little finger (pinky) on E-flat. This is truly the most contorted my hands have ever been—and this is just Grade 3! My hand looks and feels like a crab whenever it reorganises itself to fit that very specific and unorthodox chord-shape (pictured below). The good news is, after holding that impossible chord, everything else becomes easy. I remember working on the third bar (above left) and thinking, wow this one's a lot easier. I christened it the "bar of reprieve." I honestly think Chopin front-loaded this song with difficult chords, because after bar two, everything's pretty sedate. This isn't to say your fingers don't get a good stretching, but never as in bar two, and once or twice, you even get to hold three-note chords in the right hand! Very nice. So much so, that while it took me four days to learn the first four bars, I learned the other four in just one sitting. And I really learned nine bars in that time because bars 5 to 8 repeat as bars 9 to 12. Bar 13 is unique, but contains only one chord that's held for 4 beats (see last pic below). Plus, since it's the eponymous C-Minor chord—and in root position, no less!—that made it even easier to remember.

Crab Hand!

End

Once I got to the second half of the song, I noticed something else, too. My reading had improved. I know this has been the case regarding other songs in the past. I mentioned experiencing better reading results as early as Berceuse, and especially in that stretch from Watchman's Song through Pathétique. But this most certainly didn't apply to the dense chords that comprise this piece. I was very surprised to catch myself reading through those measures with an unprecedented level of ease. Not complete ease by any means, but of the kind I certainly hadn't even experienced in the first three measures. So I think the work I did on those earlier bars actually propelled me into an even better reading position. It's always good to experience measurable progress (get it?).

So for many reasons, I'm happy to have played my first official Chopin piece! (Prelude in E Minor was unofficial.) I wonder how long until I can legitimately play my first Rachmaninoff...

Crab Hand Update April 29, 2016 (Over a year later)

Can't really see much of a difference, but my hand felt way more relaxed in that position this time.

Alan Chan's rendition

Miscellany II

Hymn to the Sun (Rimsky-Korsakov) Part A March 11, 2015
Hymn to the Sun (Rimsky-Korsakov) Parts A&B March 12, 2015
Hymn to the Sun (Rimsky-Korsakov) Part C March 13, 2015
The Juggler (Loeschhorn) March 14-16, 2015
Sonatina Op. 36 No. 4, III (Clementi) Part A March 15, 2015
Hymn to the Sun (Rimsky-Korsakov) Part B March 16, 2015
Theme from 5th Symphony 2nd Mvt. (Beethoven) March 19-24, 2015
Little Prelude in E Minor (J. S. Bach) March 25, 2015
Aragonaise (Massenet) Part A March 28, 2015
Aragonaise (Massenet) Part B March 29, 2015
Aragonaise (Massenet) Part B March 31, 2015
Petite Russian Rhapsody Part A April 1, 2015
Sonata in C Mvt 1 Part A (K545) April 1, 2015
Petite Russian Rhapsody Part B April 2, 201
Petite Russian Rhapsody Part C April 3, 2015 
Petite Russian Rhapsody Part A April 4, 2015
Petite Russian Rhapsody Part B April 5, 2015
Petite Russian Rhapsody Parts A&B April 6, 2015 
Petite Russian Rhapsody April 7-11, 2015
Il Penseroso (Heller) Bars 1-2 April 12, 2015
Il Penseroso (Heller) April 14, 2015
Il Penseroso (Heller) Part A April 15, 2015
Il Penseroso (Heller) Part A April 16, 2015
Sonata in C Mvt 1 Part B (K545) April 18, 2015
Sonata in C Mvt 2 Part A (K545) April 19, 2015
Il Penseroso (Heller) Part A April 20, 2015
Elfin Dance (Jensen) April 26-28, 2015
Waltz, Op. 12, No. 2 (Grieg) May 8-9, 2015
Theme from Pathetique Symphony (Tchaikovsky) May 10, 2015
Waltz, Op. 12, No. 2 (Grieg) May 11, 2015
At Evening (Schytte) May 13-21, 2015
The Skylark (Tchaikovsky) May 22-23, 2015
Etude in Style, Part 1 (Thompson) May 24, 2015
Etude in Style, Part 2 (Thompson) May 25, 2015

Etude in Style (Thompson) June 1-5, 2015
Valse Sentimentale (Schubert) June 7-11, 2015
Melody (Massenet) June 9, 2015

30. Hungarian Rhapsodie No. 2

I wrote myself a note a week or two before this song came up in the practice queue. It read, "It's not hard; it's only pretending to be hard." This proved to be so right, and not because I have any especial acumen or ability regarding playing, but because (again) John Thompson did such a good job collecting and ordering these pieces. Each one really does gradually increase in difficulty, bringing you to a level that places the succeeding ones within reach. The song required work, naturally, but of the type that could be accomplished in a week—at least at a basic level. (Polishing will take much longer, months at least.) 

The opening (pictured above) is filled with repetitions and acciaccaturas. It is to be played lento a capriccio, which I crudely translate as slowly and whimsically. The chords are pedalled, even though they are executed in staccato; this was strange and new to me. I'm still not sure if I can actually hear the staccato or if I should be able to. I haven't quite worked out the details of pedalling yet. 

Left is the trail of the opening. By this point, the phrase has already been foreshadowed at least twice by the many grace notes and trill-esque bits that opened the song. Now it peters out (pìu ritenuto) and leads into the first theme. Note the triplets. Their value, it seems, matters only for accounting purposes. Pìu ritenuto, which is a fusion of ritardando (gradually slowing) and diminuendo (gradually softening), grants the player some of freedom in determining how to execute, so the triplets don't actually have to be played that way at all. I've never heard anyone adhere to them in any version I've listened to... Hmm... I think I might try it! The notes pictured right pick up after the flourish of the opening. They introduce the song's first melodic theme (Lassan) and require a fast switching of second and third fingers before striking C in both hands. I've improved the execution quite a bit since first trying it. I used to have to hesitate a lot to prepare myself for playing it. Now I hesitate for a much shorter period and may even get it on the first try!

Above are two similar passages for comparison. While their patterns are pretty much the same, the two groups of four semiquavers on the left are detached, while their counterparts on the right are attached. I'm not sure why that difference exists. Another difference is in the pedal use. I was acutely aware of the need to pedal all the way through the second after having pedalled only halfway through the first. Now I'm wondering if the two phenomena are related: that is, whether the beam connecting the two groups exists to reinforce the connection created by the pedal. Although the difference in the pedal marks doesn't cause any real execution problems, such details are important (and potentially problematic) for reasons concerning memorization. Consequently, I'm also acutely aware of another passage (not pictured) similar to both, but that has no pedalling indicated at all. I wonder what makes for these differences, and what makes the one on the right so special that its notes get that extra propulsion toward blending.

This interesting scalish passage is pretty much all grace notes. Recall that the song is in 2/4 time, so even though 14 notes are attached to those double beams, they fail to spend any of the measure's allotted beats. Pretty cool, huh? I worried about being able to play them fast enough, especially since I sort of thought they ought to hurry up, being grace notes and all. (I'd seen these in books sometimes, wondered why they were so small, and marveled when I realized they were just a crowd (cloud) of the same types of grace notes I'd regularly seen before as appoggiaturas and such. On those occasions, those notes had always been played pretty fast—as at the end of Chopin's Nocturne in E-Flat in which they descend like a waterfall.) But I soon came to realize that I should give them the time they request, as time sort of stands still for them here. And the execution's coming along okay. The hardest part is getting to those four B-flats fast enough to keep the timing steady with the preceding notes. They require a switching of hands, but even that part is working out okay, now that I've had a few days of practice. (Still needs a lot more work, of course.)

This section (left) is titled "Friska" and it feels a lot like a gambol. Check out that wide acciaccatura! It is crushed into a note four doors down. Luckily I'd had some practice with those octave-width ones in The Skaters, so I wasn't alarmed. (Actually, there's an octave-width one earlier in this song, too, but it's not pictured. It's in the Lassan section and goes from C to C. So I'm an old pro...) This section has the right hand jumping from first to fourth/fifth, then travelling up to the end of the octave and back down, pausing again in the middle. The cycle restarts every two measures, and while the right hand does these back-and-forth sweeps, the left hand supports with a lot of chord-repeating and -sustaining. (I'm pretty much just revealing my mnemonic devices. Naturally, my mistakes occur at every point at which this description fails.) Finally, there's the key change! C minor to F major (pictured right).

After the key change comes this Vivace section that restores the tempo and makes my fingers feel like a rubber band when playing. I've almost heard myself chanting "elas-tic band, elas-tic band..." along with the rhythm. (I frequently make up nonsense words that sound like the music as an interior accompaniment. It's weird...) The phrase repeats a bit higher with the first and third fingers doing the rubbery flicking section ("elas-") that was initially performed by the third and fourth in the section actually pictured. After this comes a bit that's even more staccato-ey, but retains a bit of the lilt, so that it forms an appropriate bridge between the previous section and the one pictured in the next paragraph. Now it is quite riddled with staccato, as you shall see.

Top right is the second of two similar 100% staccato sections. The first iteration (not shown) was like this one, but lacked the left-hand accompaniment. Instead, the left hand took care of the second and fourth group of quavers. Finally, this long staccato run, which began all the way back at Tempo giusto - Vivace, comes to an end with the array of chords pictured bottom right. So many! They actually truncate the progress of the true Hungarian Rhapsodie No. 2, though, and I remember finding this wrap-up a little abrupt when I first heard this adapted version. But I understand why J.T. ended it so: the rest of the song is just too fast and/or technically demanding for a third grade student, even if she's well on her way to fourth grade! So Liszt, au revoir: another time, another place. We'll definitely meet again, and I look forward to it :)

Alan Chan's rendition