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Liebestraum No. 3

F. Liszt

By Mayank Sanganeria

In A-flat major, this piece is 99 chord changes across 85 bars under the notes on the page — a expert-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 96 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 22× bar 2: V7/vi (G) · bar 3: V7/ii · bar 4: viiø7/V (F)
• Color chords 26× bar 17: #i · bar 18: #V · bar 19: #iii (E)
• Chord inversions 40× bar 2: V7/vi (G) (second inversion, bass G2) · bar 4: viiø7/V (F) (first inversion, bass F3) · bar 5: I7 (Eb) (second inversion, bass E-2)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 2: V7/vi (G) — C-dominant seventh chord · bar 3: V7/ii — F-dominant seventh chord · bar 4: viiø7/V (F) — D-half-diminished seventh chord
• Modulation 1× bar 54: bars 54–59: f minor (r=0.92)
• Pedal points 2× bar 56: D-3 held bars 56–57 under ii7 (Db), viiø7 (Db), IV7 · bar 82: A-2 held bars 82–84 under I, I7

Free scores

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