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The Merry Peasant (Album for the Young, Op. 68 No. 10)

R. Schumann

By Mayank Sanganeria

In F major, this piece is 35 chord changes across 21 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 17 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 4: V7/V (D) · bar 8: V7/V (D)
• Chord inversions 15× bar 2: I (A) (first inversion, bass A3) · bar 3: I (C) (second inversion, bass C3) · bar 4: V (E) (first inversion, bass E3)
• Seventh chords 12× bar 3: V7 — C-dominant seventh chord · bar 4: V7/V (D) — G-dominant seventh chord · bar 7: V7 — C-dominant seventh chord
• Pedal points 2× bar 8: C3 held bars 8–10 under V, V7 · bar 14: C3 held bars 14–16 under I (C), V7

Free scores

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