Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Favourite piece you learned in the first two years

Haydn's Adagio in F. I played it last year at my first recital and it was very well received.

I began as a "mature" adult, and found the first year of lessons rather intimidating. Partly
due to memories of my consistantly failing music classes in junior high school, and a Father
who refused to "waste money on piano lessons for a child with no talent".

But... learn I did and at the end of 2 years my favourites were: Tchaikovsky's The Sick Doll & Scott
Joplin's The Entertainer.

It's hard going back in memory that far, but I think CPE Bach's "Solfeggietto" was an early piece for me. It is very fun and has a high impressiveness to difficulty ratio.

+ 1 for The Sick Doll.

Either I didn't get that you are all kidding, or my progress is even slower than I already thought it would be.
I have had Hammond organ classes for some 4 years as a kid, and as an adult starting to play piano had the advantage to only have had to warm up fingers of the right hand, and was mainly busy with expanding left hand hammering of chords to more independent playing. But most of the mentioned pieces are by one month practicing still out of reach for me.

I could imagine that a raw beginner make it to The Sick Doll, as mentioned, after two years, and then within a reasonable short practicing time of one month. And it is a beautiful piece.

Other beautiful pieces, still played by me, and in my opinion reachable with two years of experience, would be:
Nicolas Miaskovsky "Dialogue"
Cornelius Gurlitt "Study in d-minor", from Opus 82
Fritz Spindler "Song without Words"
L.Köhler "Melody", Opus 190 No 27
Claudia Rojahn "Blätter im Wind"

I wasn't kidding about my pieces (well, maybe I exaggerated slightly because I started the Moonlight at about the 2 year mark), but everyone's progress is different. It really depends.

It's definitely possible to play these after two years, but for that you have to have very good practice habits, discipline, and a good teacher. Since I started, I have always been working on several pieces at the same time. My teacher noticed that I learn new music quickly and kept assigning new pieces so I wouldn't get bored, but at the same time I would work on material of similar difficulty on my own. I must have worked seriously on at least 150 pieces in my first two years (not including reading material and "just for fun" stuff that I tried and then let go).

I'm slightly over a year in to my lessons and my favorite piece so far is the one I'm learning right now, Chopin Waltz in A Minor B 150 (posthumous) I'd actually read about it in a forum post here asking what the easiest (hah!) Chopin piece was, and this was one of the recommendations. I approached my teacher with it, half expecting him to laugh at me even suggesting I could attempt Chopin at my level, but he thought it was a great idea. It's a really beautiful piece, though it's pushing my ability to control phrasing and dynamics.

Sheet music can be found here:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Waltz_in_A_minor,_B.150_(Chopin,_Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric)

I'm reading from "Chopin - First Book for Pianists" however, as it's printed with larger measures (easier to read and add lots of notes!) and the author prints the decorations over the measure which I find much easier to deal with as a beginner. The book is here: https://www.amzn.com/0739021745

A recording of it being played far better than I can (so far!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtQRpmaaiCo