Innocence (25 Easy Studies, Op. 100 No. 5)

Background

Friedrich Burgmüller (1806–1874) was born in Regensburg into a family of musicians and grew up in Düsseldorf. In his mid-twenties he moved to Paris, where he spent the rest of his career teaching the piano and writing light, elegant music, including salon pieces and music for the ballet.

His lasting fame rests on a teaching book. In 1851 he published 25 Études faciles et progressives, Op. 100: twenty-five easy, progressive studies, "composed and fingered expressly for small hands", as the full French title explains. Each study has a technical point to make, but each also has a descriptive title and a character of its own, so it feels like a piece rather than an exercise. L'Innocence is No. 5. The book has never really gone out of use, and Burgmüller later followed it with a harder set, the 18 Études de genre, Op. 109.

The title suggests something simple and unworried, and the music matches: a gentle waltz-like tune in F major, decorated with little cascades of sixteenth notes.

How to practise it

This arrangement has 32 bars in 3/4 time. An eight-bar tune is played twice (bars 1 to 16), then a brighter section that climbs high up the keyboard is also played twice (bars 17 to 32). The first part is about falling groups of four; the second is about climbing.

Bar 1 is three groups of four sixteenth notes, each a little scale going down, each starting a third lower than the one before.

One simple fingering uses 4-3-2-1 for every group, so the hand only has to drop a third between groups. Practise each group as a single gesture, a little weight on the first note and the rest falling lightly. Then pause on the first note of each group (stop, play four, stop) before joining them up. Keep the wrist loose; tension makes the cascade lumpy.

The left hand holds soft chords for whole bars or repeats them on each beat; keep them quiet enough that the sixteenths float on top. In bar 8 the roles swap for a moment: the right hand stops on a C while the left hand has a little run of eighth notes.

The second section starts with a long-short-short figure that climbs step by step:

Over four bars this rises to the C three octaves above middle C, then falls in a scale. Read the high notes slowly at first and mark the top C in your copy. Underneath, the left hand rocks gently between B flat and C, then A and C.

Tempo ladder: 60, 76, 92, then the full 104. At every stage, listen for the waltz lilt: a gentle lean on beat 1, lighter beats 2 and 3. The cascades should sound like soft rain, not a race.

Sixteenth notes and how to count them are covered in note lengths and rhythm.