Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4
Robert Schumann (1810–1856) · sheet music
- Key G major
- Time 4/4
- Levels 1–2
- Passages 10
Your turn · both hands
Preparing your passage…
Robert Schumann, German romantic (1810–1856). The reading release has 10 passages from this piece at levels 1–2; the reader above opens on the easiest, bars 3–4 for the right hand alone.
The hardest stretch is bars 1–4 at level 2.
Your practice path
Learn it the way teachers do: each hand on its own, then together, then the hard bars. Each step is a real graded passage of Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4.
- Right hand alone · bars 3–4 level 1
- Left hand alone · bars 13–16 level 1
- The hardest bars · bars 1–4 level 2
How to play Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4
- Choose a calm, steady tempo like a congregation singing, and take a short, unhurried breath at each fermata before going on.
- Each hand usually plays two voices, so let the top voice in the right hand sing a little louder than the others while all the notes still sound together.
- Connecting chords smoothly without pedal is the hard part; keep fingers on the common notes between chords and let the others move, and add pedal only to cover gaps you can't reach.
- Practice the soprano and bass lines together first to hear the outline, then add the inner voices one at a time.
Structure
The piece in G major is very short, well under a minute, and presents the hymn as a series of brief phrases, each ending with a fermata pause, much as a congregation would breathe between lines. The melody is in the top voice with three lower parts beneath it, harmonized in a plain, hymnbook style.
About Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4
Schumann included this chorale in Album for the Young in 1848, partly to bring children into contact with the hymn harmonizations he admired in Bach. The tune is generally identified as Freu dich sehr, o meine Seele, a melody Bach harmonized several times.
Why the first passage is level 1
That passage is level 1, the first rung: it moves by whole steps or less, in half-note values, in one hand.
Schumann based this short chorale, No. 4 of his Album for the Young, on a Lutheran hymn tune. It moves in slow, even notes with four-part harmony, so it trains reading chords vertically, a beat at a time. Hold each chord for its full value before moving on.
Questions about Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4
- How hard is Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4 to play?
- Its passages grade from level 1 to level 2 on Real Sight Reader's ten-level reading scale, which keeps all of it within beginner reading. The hardest stretch is bars 1–4 at level 2.
- Is there an easy part of Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4 for beginners?
- Yes. Start with bars 3–4 for the right hand alone, the level-1 passage in the reader at the top of this page.
- What key and time signature is Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4 in?
- Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4 is in G major, 1 sharp. The engraving on this page is in 4/4 time.
- Who composed Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4?
- Robert Schumann, German romantic (1810–1856). Schumann included this chorale in Album for the Young in 1848, partly to bring children into contact with the hymn harmonizations he admired in Bach.
- Can I practice Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4 online for free?
- Yes. The reader on this page plays any of the 10 graded passages from Chorale, Op. 68 No. 4 in your browser, with an on-screen keyboard or a MIDI keyboard, and marks every note as you play. No signup.
Every passage, easiest first
The reading release grades 10 distinct passages of this piece. Open any of them in the reader:
- Level 1
- bars 3–4 right hand · bars 5–6 right hand · bars 13–16 left hand · bars 21–24 right hand · bars 29–32 right hand
- Level 2
- bars 1–4 left hand · bars 1–8 left hand · bars 21–24 left hand · bars 25–28 right hand · bars 25–32 right hand
More pieces to sight-read
Score: public-domain engraving from the corpus (pdmx), graded by the piano-reading-v2-20261001-mutopia-ly reading release.