What is in this collection
Fifty-five sheets of the pieces students ask for most often, spanning four centuries and crossing instrument boundaries. Mozart is the best represented with nine pieces, Bach with seven, Tárrega and Beethoven with four each, then Grieg, Burgmüller, Satie and Schumann with two each.
The scale ranges from a one-page character piece to a full orchestral movement: Beethoven’s Allegretto from the Seventh Symphony runs to fifty-four pages here, Dvořák’s Ninth to eighteen, Vivaldi’s “Spring” to twenty-three. These are not practice pieces but complete movements for reading along and analysing — useful when you have a recording playing and want to know what is happening.
Alongside them sit the short classics: Grieg’s Albumblatt, Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, Tchaikovsky’s “Old French Song” from the Album for the Young, “Auld Lang Syne” in Felix Horetzky’s guitar setting, and Tárrega’s “Adelita”. These run one to three pages and are playable within a few weeks.
Why these particular pieces last
Pieces that survive two hundred years almost always share two properties: a melody you can hum after hearing it once, and a harmony simpler than the result sounds. Tchaikovsky’s “Old French Song” is essentially an eight-bar melody in G minor over little more than tonic and dominant. Satie builds the first Gymnopédie on an alternation of two chords that repeats without going anywhere — the floating quality comes precisely from the expected resolution never arriving.
In Grieg it is the third that does the work: the Albumblatt lives off the tension between major and minor triads on the same degree, and because the difference is a single note, the mood tips mid-phrase without the melody changing direction. Play that piece and you hear within a few bars what one semitone in an inner voice can do.
Bach works differently. His pieces last not because of an effect but because the voices are led so that each one on its own makes a sensible melody. You can split a Bach minuet between two instruments and both players have a line worth playing. Hardly any other composer manages this with such consistency, and it is why Bach has been in every keyboard method since 1723.
In practice
This is the collection recital pieces come from. For a first performance after roughly a year, Tchaikovsky’s “Old French Song” and Grieg’s Albumblatt work well: short enough to memorise securely, slow enough that nerves cannot tear them apart, and familiar enough that an audience responds. A fast piece at full tempo is the worst possible choice for a first performance — under pressure the tempo rises involuntarily by ten to fifteen per cent.
Satie’s Gymnopédie is often underestimated because it is slow. That is exactly its difficulty: at crotchet equals 60 every inaccuracy of touch and every unsteadiness of pulse is audible. Technically it sits within reach in the second year; musically it is a task for advanced players.
For the large movements — Beethoven, Dvořák, Vivaldi — there is a separate way of working that has nothing to do with playing: reading along. Put the score out, start a recording, follow with your finger. After three passes you hear entries you had missed. In Beethoven’s Allegretto you can track the theme in A minor moving from violas to cellos to first violins while staying the same throughout — a process that is hard to grasp by listening alone.
Common mistakes
The famous piece gets started too early. Schubert’s “Ave Maria” is vocally and pianistically harder than its fame suggests: long phrases, even triplets throughout, and no room to breathe at the obvious places. Tackle it in the first year and you play it half-right for two years. The short pieces in this collection get you there sooner and prepare the ground.
Tempo gets chosen from the famous recording rather than from your own level. Nearly every piece here exists in a celebrated performance that is the result of decades of work. That tempo is not an instruction. The sensible tempo is the one at which the hardest bar of the piece still comes out cleanly — everything else then sounds right by itself.
Pedalling gets added by ear. In the keyboard pieces here the pedal is marked where it belongs; in Satie and Grieg it is part of the composition, and in Bach it does not appear at all. A Bach minuet with the pedal down throughout loses the very property you play it for: the audible separation of the voices.
Memorising gets postponed. With recital pieces it pays to practise from memory from the moment the notes are basically secure, not two weeks before the date. Start late and you have two processes running at once, and under pressure the younger one collapses first.