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Waltz in A minor, B. 150

F. Chopin

By Mayank Sanganeria

In A minor, this piece is 57 chord changes across 57 bars under the notes on the page — a advanced-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 90 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 7× bar 3: V7/III · bar 7: V7/III · bar 11: V7/III
• Color chords 1× bar 36: #vi7 (A)
• Chord inversions 4× bar 20: VI7 (A) (first inversion, bass A2) · bar 36: #vi7 (A) (first inversion, bass A2) · bar 53: i7 (C) (first inversion, bass C3)
• Seventh chords 23× bar 3: V7/III — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 7: V7/III — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 11: V7/III — G-dominant seventh chord
• Modulation 2× bar 5: bars 5–15: C major (r=0.92) · bar 33: bars 33–40: A major (r=0.93)

Free scores

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