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Nocturne in E♭, Op. 9 No. 2

F. Chopin

By Mayank Sanganeria

In E-flat major, this piece is 82 chord changes across 35 bars under the notes on the page — a advanced-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 88 of 97 in the library, ranked easiest to hardest. Reduced to block chords, that's a progression you can learn in a sitting; the piece you're reading is that progression wearing figuration.

Practice this piece → Practice chords → Learn it section by section → Hear the harmony → Sight-read something new →

What's inside the harmony

Reducing the piece to block chords and labeling every change turns up harmonic phenomena that are easy to miss reading the figuration straight — each one below is also its own corpus-wide census.

• Secondary dominants 20× bar 2: V7/ii · bar 3: V7/vi (B) · bar 3: viio7/V
• Color chords 2× bar 11: #iv7 (E) · bar 19: #iv7 (E)
• Chord inversions 37× bar 1: I7 (D) (third inversion, bass D2) · bar 2: v7 (F) (second inversion, bass F2) · bar 3: V7/vi (B) (first inversion, bass B2)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 1: I7 (D) — Eb-major seventh chord · bar 2: V7/ii — C-dominant seventh chord · bar 2: v7 (F) — Bb-minor seventh chord
• Pedal points 1× bar 25: E-2 held bars 25–26 under iiø7 (Eb), I, I7

Free scores

• Blocked-chord reduction (MusicXML) — the harmony skeleton the player performs
• The piece as written (compressed MusicXML)