What to do if a piece seems to be slipping/falling apart?

My first impulse when reading your question was to suggest: “consider your piece as a completely new piece and learn it form scratch not skipping any steps and not cutting any corners”. But then I thought about something else that may help you (but then again it may not be your problem).

Consider an actor who has to memorise some lines in a play (or a movie), and yet his lines keep slipping and he keeps having these memory lapses, and now he is afraid to step on stage (or in front of the camera) and forget his lines.

Now it is very possible that this actor’s problem is simply that he is focussing too much on the actual words and lines, rather than enquiring further on the meaning of the play/movie as a whole, on his character role in the plot, and on investigating the character himself: who is this character? What are his motivations? What makes him tick? Unless he really get to grips with his character in this way, his lines will not make much sense and he will keep forgetting them. Memory is closely associated with meaning. This actor must first of all know his character back to front – if the play/script is well written (that is if the writer knows his characters really well), than all the lines will follow logically from the character’s psychological profile. In fact, the actor must go as far as to become the character. If he succeeds in doing that, he will say his lines perfectly even if he does not say them exactly as written. Who knows, his version may be even better than the original one!

A musical score is very similar to a script. You must bring it alive though your performance, but if you become obsessed with the lines (that is, you are faithful to the score) you may be missing the point. You must be faithful to what the score represents, rather than the score itself. If you truly understand the meaning of each passage and its role in the totality of the piece (the role of each sentence spoken by an actor in the general meaning of a play), then there is no way you can have a memory slip. And if you have you will be able to recover from it by improvising (pretty much like an actor may forget a line, but if he is truly in touch with his character’s personality and the play’s plot, he will be able to come up with a perfectly acceptable – or even better – alternative).

So my suggestion to you is not to keep practising this piece at the piano every day, but to give it a rest (at the piano) for a couple of weeks, and spend the time you would be at the piano at the library/internet/talking with knowledgeable people, so that you can get at the heart of the meaning of this piece. You will find (as it is invariably the case with Bach), that this is a superbly written script, where every note counts, and could not be improved upon. Then every note, every ornament will have meaning, and you will not be able to have a memory slip.

One last word. You may say that this is not your problem at all. You may say that your problem is more physical, that you loose the finger co-ordination and so on. But even then, remember that the lines an actor say are by far the least important aspect of his acting. His body language is far more important in conveying the lines. Likewise, in piano playing the movements themselves are deeply related to the overall meaning/interpretation of a piece. The study I am suggesting above will direct and inform your technique as much or more than simple practice at the piano.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.