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Swan Lake Theme

P. I. Tchaikovsky

By Mayank Sanganeria

In B minor, this piece is 35 chord changes across 32 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 36 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 2× bar 11: V7/III (G) · bar 15: V7/III (G)
• Borrowed chords 1× bar 19: bv (C#)
• Color chords 2× bar 14: #vi (C#) · bar 14: III+7 (F#)
• Neapolitan chords 1× bar 18: bII
• Chord inversions 14× bar 3: iiø7 (B) (third inversion, bass B3) · bar 5: VI7 (F#) (third inversion, bass F#3) · bar 6: iv7 (B) (second inversion, bass B3)
• Seventh chords 13× bar 3: iiø7 (B) — C#-half-diminished seventh chord · bar 5: VI7 (F#) — G-major seventh chord · bar 6: iv7 (B) — E-minor seventh chord
• Pedal points 4× bar 1: B3 held bars 1–4 under i, iiø7 (B) · bar 6: B3 held bars 6–8 under i, iv7 (B), iiø7 (B) · bar 20: B3 held bars 20–21 under i, iiø7 (B)

Free scores

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