Welcome to Gaia! ::

Tomorrow...or rather today (haven't slept) my string quartet is playing in a master class, and because yours truly is apparently all kinds of crazy, we're doing Beethoven's infamous Große Fugue...and we've only had time for three rehearsals in the span of two weeks.

For those of you who may not know, a master class is a form of torture so sublimely evil that the UN should have banned its practice years ago.

It's a public performance in front of an audience wherein a musician (or set of musicians in the case of chamber music) performs a piece, and then a teacher comes on stage and picks apart all the mistakes that you managed to coolly gloss over in such a way that the audience never would have noticed. It's like having your soul ripped to pieces for public amusement.

We were actually entered into this without my consultation or consent, but I figured that hey, if you're on a sinking ship you may as well sink it good and go down with it, so the fault of choosing a heinously difficult piece of string quartet literature falls to me.

The Große Fugue is one of Beethoven's last string quartets (single-movement, unusual for its time), and it was received absolutely terribly when it premiered, and for a good while afterward. But in these more enlightened times, it's finally being recognised for what it is: a piece of musical genius so complex and ahead of its time that the ears of the 19th century simply couldn't make sense of it. It's a truly brilliant piece of music and to me has always been the musical personification of Beethoven himself: fierce, complicated, full of pain, and very, very difficult to deal with.

And it's because I have such a deep and long-standing respect for both the piece and its composer that I really don't want to mess it up, but when we rehearsed last night...we're barely holding together by the skin of our teeth.

Pray that we don't all make grand fools of ourselves and butcher a musical treasure?

Much love and God bless.

Oh, dude. I feel for you, truly. That's one thing I really don't miss about classical performance. Even though I'm sure you're an amazing instrumentalist, a little extra prayer is certainly helpful.

Sending up prayers for you! Good luck smile

I'm glad.