PATHETIQUE

Run for your lives!
You're going to be inflicted with another piano tape.

Whenever I'm depressed and burdened with a myriad of seemingly unresolvable problems - - whenever I don't feel like writing a cutesy, upbeat blog post - - I resort to posting my piano music. 

I'm sure it bores the hell out of some people, but it inevitably lifts my spirits by reminding me of the person I used to be. 

Yesterday, while sorting through the hopeless pile of junk that's in the garage, I found - among my mother's possessions - one of my old piano tapes. This surprised me because I didn't remember the tape. I must have given it to my Mom long ago and then forgot about it.

According to the label on the tape, I recorded it in Anaheim, CA, 1983. 
It's the complete piano sonata #8 in C minor, op. 13 by Ludwig van Beethoven - known as the "Pathetique".

Beethoven never called it "Pathetique", but his music publisher added the word on the title for dramatic effect.

Beethoven wrote this sonata in 1798 when he was 27. Upon listening to it last night, I was struck by how vastly ahead of his time Beethoven was.
The intense passion and technical difficulty of this work was previously unheard of in the 1700's. It's completely astounding (not to mention the fact that he was already going deaf at that time).

Okay, I'll admit it -
I'm also impressed at how well I performed it, considering that it's one of my very early recordings. Through the years I've recorded the Pathetique Sonata at least six times, but this is my earliest known recording of it.

Last night I transferred my tape to an Mp3 file (via Audacity) and today I uploaded it to my SoundCloud account (took me twenty minutes to figure out what my password was for SoundCloud).

Since the sonata is very long, I've only posted the first movement here:
Grave - Allegro di molto e Con Brio.