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Moonlight Sonata, 1st Movement

L. v. Beethoven

By Mayank Sanganeria

In C-sharp minor, this piece is 83 chord changes across 69 bars under the notes on the page — a advanced-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 92 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 4× bar 12: viio7/VII · bar 20: V7/iv (E#) · bar 24: V7/iv (E#)
• Color chords 2× bar 21: #viio7 · bar 40: III+ (G#)
• Neapolitan chords 2× bar 52: bII7 (C#) · bar 54: bII7 (C#)
• Chord inversions 40× bar 2: i7 (B) (third inversion, bass B1) · bar 6: V7 (B#) (first inversion, bass B#1) · bar 8: v7 (B) (first inversion, bass B1)
• Seventh chords 40× bar 2: i7 (B) — C#-minor seventh chord · bar 3: iv7 — F#-minor seventh chord · bar 4: V7 — G#-dominant seventh chord
• Pedal points 4× bar 15: B1 held bars 15–18 under vii, bI7 (B), VII · bar 28: G#1 held bars 28–36 under V7, i (G#), viiø7/VII (G#) · bar 38: G#1 held bars 38–40 under V7, III+ (G#)

Free scores

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