March of the Wooden Soldiers (Album for the Young, Op. 39 No. 5)

Background

March of the Wooden Soldiers is No. 5 of Tchaikovsky's Album for the Young, Op. 39, written in 1878 and dedicated to his young nephew Vladimir Davydov, known in the family as Volodya. Several pieces in the album are about toys: there is a new doll, a sick doll and even a doll's funeral, and here a row of wooden soldiers marches by.

Toy soldiers came back to Tchaikovsky's music fourteen years later, in his ballet The Nutcracker (1892), where they fight the Mouse King's army.

Schumann's Album for the Young, which Tchaikovsky took as his model, has a Soldiers' March of its own, and the two make a good pair to compare: Schumann's is sturdy and square, while Tchaikovsky's sits higher on the keyboard and sounds small and clockwork.

How to practise it

This arrangement is 48 bars in D major and 2/4: a sixteen-bar march, a sixteen-bar middle section, and the march again. Both hands stay in the middle of the keyboard, and for most of the march the left hand plays above middle C, which keeps the sound bright, like a toy.

Two rhythms run through the whole piece. The first is an eighth note followed by an eighth rest: play it short and lift, as if the key were hot. The second is the dotted rhythm of bar 2, a dotted eighth note and a sixteenth note. Count "1 e & a 2 e & a" and put each sixteenth on "a", just before the next beat.

Bar 7 is the hardest moment for the right hand: falling pairs of notes (E and G, D and F sharp, C sharp and E, B and D) in the same dotted rhythm. Try fingers 3 and 5, 2 and 4, 1 and 3, then 1 and 3 again a step lower. Whatever you choose, write it in and keep it.

The left hand answers in bar 8 with a little drum roll on A:

Changing fingers on the repeated notes (for example 3, 2, 1, 3, 2) keeps them quick and even.

The middle section, bars 17 to 32, turns more serious: B flat and G sharp crowd around A in the right hand, over three-note chords in the left. Learn it on its own before joining it to the march.

To build speed:

1. Separate hands at 60, with every rest clearly silent.
2. Hands together at 60, then 84 and 104.
3. The full 126 only when the dotted rhythms stay sharp.

Use no pedal, keep the fingers close to the keys and the touch light. These are small wooden soldiers, not a brass band.