Out of reach: an amateur pianist's dream pieces

I was five when I heard my mother playing Beethoven's Für Elise on our little upright, and I demanded she show me how to conjure that magic with my own hands. With a single-mindedness my adult self envies, I set about learning to read music, shaping my fingers around those 200-year-old notes and coming to an interpretation I felt proud of. The rest of my life as an amateur pianist has proceeded similarly: I hear a piece that strikes a particularly resonant chord and learn it to the best of my ability. It's still magic to me to reproduce, even approximately, a work of music that gives me goosebumps — but I will always wonder how it feels to be one of the very best, to communicate the music exactly as I hear it in my mind without any technical limitations.

Here are ten pieces I have played with varying degrees of success, from the virtuosic Liszt that dazzled me as a kid to the fire and romance of Chopin and Ravel I fell in love with as a teenager; the crisp Baroque lines of Bach and Scarlatti that sparked a renewed musical focus in my twenties; the idiosyncratic poetry of Schumann that I had always enjoyed but came to fully adore in my thirties; and of course, the piece that first made me dream of being a concert pianist, and the one on this list whose explosive cadenzas, lightning-quick finger work, and supersized chords remain the furthest out of reach for me (though I'll never stop trying): Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3.