Few things are more revealing than a Beethoven Sonata in the hands of a teenage student: I see in her comprehension-motivated reading the exact opposite of my reading at her age (16), the goal of which was to play it as painlessly as possible.

This morning I discovered that one movement that has always felt weird to me need not feel weird at all: it begins with an upbeat bar while I had always heard it as a downbeat bar which, of course, throws the entire movement off balance. She got it; I did not.