We do not need to pity Beethoven for being boring, for he is not. His music has been rendered hopelessly dull by generations of piano teachers insisting that counting to four is all there is to it.
Give the student the illusion that they have learned something by disguising all the mystery, all the conundrums, all the humor of a piano sonata, and there you have the generations-old win-win situation.
Who is laughing? Probably Ludwig van B.
He had a way of putting in the last two bars of a movement the hint as to what you had missed all along. How many of us get the joke?
Is this why people find it so hard to believe that there is another, a better way?
