Für Elise (the opening theme)

Background

Beethoven never saw Für Elise in print. The piece is a bagatelle, French for "a trifle": a short, light piano piece of the kind he wrote throughout his life and later published in sets such as Op. 33, Op. 119 and Op. 126. This one stayed in manuscript. It surfaced only in 1867, forty years after his death, when the scholar Ludwig Nohl published it from an autograph he had seen, dated (by his account) 27 April 1810. That manuscript has since been lost, so nobody can check what the heading really said. Because it has no opus number, it is catalogued as WoO 59, WoO meaning "work without opus number".

Who Elise was is still an open question; the full Für Elise page covers the main theories. What is not in doubt is the opening theme, which has become one of the most recognised tunes in piano music.

How to practise it

This arrangement is just that famous opening: the theme played once through, eight bars of 3/8 after a two-note upbeat, ending on A. It is the best way to learn the theme before tackling the whole piece, because the same music returns again and again later.

Begin with the right hand's rocking figure, which uses the two neighbouring keys E and D sharp:

Keep fingers 5 and 4 resting on the keys and roll the hand gently from one to the other, rather than lifting each finger high. Play it slowly, perfectly evenly, ten times, before you go on.

The second skill is the handover. In bars 2, 3 and 4, the left hand plays three rising notes and the right hand continues with the next three, so together they make one smooth line of six sixteenth notes.

Practise that line on its own with a metronome ticking eighth notes. Listen for any gap or bump where the hands meet; the aim is that a listener cannot hear where one hand stops and the other starts.

A step-by-step plan:

1. Right hand alone, bars 1 to 5, at half speed.
2. Left hand alone: A, E, A then E, E, G sharp, held lightly.
3. Hands together, bars 2 to 4 only, until the handovers are seamless.
4. The whole theme at half speed, then three-quarter speed, then full speed.

Keep the dynamics soft throughout; Beethoven marks the opening pianissimo. Let the A at the end of bar 2 and the B at the end of bar 3 sound like gentle landings, and lift the hands softly at each rest rather than letting the sound stop abruptly. When this theme is secure, the full bagatelle is the natural next step.