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Für Elise

L. v. Beethoven

By Mayank Sanganeria

In A minor, this piece is 83 chord changes across 106 bars under the notes on the page — a intermediate-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 85 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 6× bar 11: V7/III · bar 49: V7/III · bar 62: viio7/iv (E)
• Color chords 2× bar 64: #vii · bar 76: #viio7 (B)
• Neapolitan chords 3× bar 26: bII7 (F) · bar 73: bII · bar 75: bII7
• Chord inversions 19× bar 26: bII7 (F) (second inversion, bass F3) · bar 27: vii7 (F) (third inversion, bass F3) · bar 29: iv7 (F) (first inversion, bass F3)
• Seventh chords 28× bar 7: V7 — E-dominant seventh chord · bar 11: V7/III — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 22: V7 — E-dominant seventh chord
• Modulation 2× bar 25: bars 25–29: F major (r=0.91) · bar 30: bars 30–37: C major (r=0.95)
• Pedal points 3× bar 25: F3 held bars 25–29 under VI7, bII7 (F), vii7 (F), VI · bar 73: B-2 held bars 73–75 under bII, bV7 (Bb), bII7 · bar 80: A3 held bars 80–82 under i, i7

Free scores

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