Morning Prayer (Album for the Young, Op. 39 No. 1)

Background

Morning Prayer opens Tchaikovsky's Album for the Young, Op. 39, a set of twenty-four easy pieces he wrote in 1878. Its title page mentions Robert Schumann, whose own Album for the Young of 1848 was the model, and like Schumann he filled the collection with a child's world: games, dolls, folk songs, a fairy tale or two. The album begins with this prayer and ends with In Church, another piece in the manner of sacred music, so the whole collection is framed by quiet, hymn-like pages.

The piece is written like music for a small choir. There are four voices, two in each hand, and for most of the time they move together, one chord after another, as singers would. That makes it a gentle introduction to playing chords in both hands.

How to practise it

This version is 24 bars in G major and 3/4, at a slow 63 beats a minute. Each hand plays two notes at a time, occasionally three.

Because the hands move together, rhythm is not the main difficulty. Evenness is: every note of a chord should sound at the same instant, every chord at the same gentle level, with the top note slightly louder than the rest.

Practise it this way:

1. Right hand alone, chord by chord, placing all the fingers before you press. Then the left hand.
2. Hands together, stopping on each chord to check that all four notes began together.
3. Each bar without stopping, joining one chord to the next as smoothly as you can.

The piece moves in three stages. Bars 1 to 8 already pass through a few sharps (D sharp in bar 4, G sharp in bar 5) before pausing on a D major chord. Bars 9 to 16 begin the same way and go further: bar 12 is an F sharp major chord, with A sharp and C sharp, and bar 13 brings D sharp and G sharp again. Learn bars 11 to 13 as block chords before anything else. From bar 16 a low G sounds again and again in the bass while the upper voices wind down to the final G major chord.

In bar 12 the right hand spans an octave, F sharp to F sharp with C sharp between. If that is too wide for you, leave out the middle note at first.

Build the speed from 40 to 52, then the full 63. The sustaining pedal helps to join the chords: lift it as you play each new chord and press it down again straight afterwards. Listen for a calm, unbroken sound, like a choir breathing together.

These chords make good practice after the intervals and first chords unit.