Sturm und Drang
It's been a long time since I dipped into this Bible. In 1996, I got an early inheritance: my father's piano. My parents had two grand pianos in their living room, a 1926 Schiller and a 1932 Cable, and were about to buy another, a brand new Kawai. Two grand pianos is two more than most houses have, and one more than most of the remaining, piano-owning, homes; it's something I've only seen in the homes of full-time piano teachers. In any case, having three in that living room (along with the full-size church organ) was clearly out of the question, so the Cable came to live with me. It had been several years since I'd had a piano in my home, and I went slightly nuts over the thing. On my next trip to Portland (I was living in McMinnville at the time), I dropped by the Sheet Music Service (remember that store?) and picked up a complete two-volume set of Beethoven's piano sonatas. There were a few I wanted very badly to learn, but this was about more than addi...