Welcome to Minedit! In this post we’ll be talking about everything there is to know about the Fur Elise Sheet Music.
About Fur Elise
Another name for Fur Elise is “Bagatelle No.25”, in the key of A minor. The peace is obviously often known as “Fur Elise”, which is written for piano by none other than Ludwig Van Beethoven. It’s one of his most infamous composition and wasn’t publishing while he was alive, but rather discovered about 40 years after Beethoven had died.
As of this day, we still do not know who Elise was, and why Beethoven had written a song for Elise. However, many have suggested that the Elise Beethoven was referring to might have been Elisabeth Röckel or Elise Barensfeld.
When Was It Published?
They didn’t get around to publishing Fur Elise until the year 1867. As mentioned earlier, this happens to be 40 years after Beethoven had died. The person who discovered the piece was Ludwig Nohl.
When Nohl discovered the manuscript it it was still fully intact, however it has now been lost completely. Nohl mentioned that on the original manuscript it was written the date of April 27th, 1810.
They ended up publishing the song as a part of Nohl’s New Letter’s by Beethoven book, which can be found on page 28 to 33.
There are actually two different versions out there of Fur Elise. The one we all know is the one as transcribed by Nohl, however there is another version that transcribe from a different manuscript by one of Beethoven’s Scholars Barry Cooper.
The biggest difference ends up being that the left hand arpeggios were delayed by 16th notes, which was incredibly weird to hear.
Fur Elise is one of the first song that I start to use in order to teach classical music to students.
Obviously, whenever a student is brand new to piano, we don’t get there until we’ve covered some of the basics, and then some, so in this particular case, I will explain exactly how I often times take a very beginner student, to being able to play Fur Elise, fast.
And let’s be honest, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? The ability to train a student or ourself fast, to get to the ability to play incredibly cool music.
Well, that’s exactly what we’ll be describing down below.
Preparations to do before playing Fur Elise
With preparations, I mean, practicing. What and how do we need to do in order to successfully be able to play this song.
I’ll be sharing some tips down below on what you can do if you’re a brand new pianist or are looking into what it takes to get to this level and you haven’t even touched a piano:
- Technique Exercices.
I personally love technique exercises, because you have the ability with those exercises to practice a lot, make a lot of progress and you actually don’t have to use your brain. (Unlike when you’re practicing scales or arpeggios.)
The purpose of technique exercises is to come up with exercises that will allow your fingers to work through every muscles they have. This may still include arpeggios and scales, but often times, it’s not as heavily focussed on it.
Let me show you what I mean.
Let’s say as an exercise, we’re placing our 5 fingers of every hand on the piano, both starting on the C note (doesn’t matter which C). This means that your left pinky is starting on the C note on the left hand side, while the right hand is starting on the C note with the thumb on the right hand side.
All of the other fingers follow the next note in line.
One great exercises is to now play the same notes in both hands together (in unison) from left to right. This comes out to be C D E F G and then from right to left in one movement, (G) you’ll already have played that one, let’s not play it twice, F E D C.
You can repeat this process to warm up your fingers.
Let’s place this exercise and translate it into a numbered system, with C being 1 and D 2 and so on.
Then you would have, 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1.
Now, that very next step is, to take that exercise and speed it up.
Once you’ve speed it up, you find permutations, such as 1 3 2 4 5 4 2 3 1 or 1 4 3 2 5 2 3 4 1.
There are so many varieties you can apply, and the main reason for this is because with every single permutation, comes a muscle in your finger that has not been worked out yet.
The next step, is to continue whatever pattern you are practicing, on the white keys, in a moving direction.
Let’s take 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1. Let’s say you place this exercise and once you finish it, you take this concept and start it on D, which would then be D E F G A G F E D, instead of C D E F G F E D C.
And then you can keep on going up and up and up, and then down.
Every single one of these changes that you make to the exercise will throw you a curve ball when you’re practicing this with a metronome. And that’s okay, because songs do this to.
The entire point of this exercise is to really work through your fingers, because this is all that matter when it comes to physical being able to play the Fur Elise Sheet Music, and to be quite honest, this is the biggest problem I see with people who are trying to learn piano fast, especially classical piano.
Now, the next thing that is very important to practice, is harmony. More importantly triads.
The thing I always do, is I take a sheet of paper and make it so that students have to practice all major and all minor triads so that they have a sense of what harmony looks like. This, because it will give them an understanding of harmony whenever they see the connection.
Harmony is built in third intervals, and so practicing triads will give them a sense of understanding of what’s happening in something like the Fur Elise Sheet Music. How? Well, first of all, because in the first few measures we have something that looks like an A minor arpeggio, followed by a E Major arpeggio of some sort. When you know what these chords look like instead of just memorizing these positions, the battle is halfway won.
Once students have the chords down at least a little bit, I get them started with th eFur Elise Sheet Music.
- Fur Elise
Now, what does that look like? Starting with the Fur Elise Sheet Music?
Well, first of all, We start at the very beginning. As an educator, I always recommend looking over the chart and making sure we’re aware of all of the little details, such as what’s the time signature, what’s the key etc.
Next, we just start at the beginning, very slow. Note after note.
And that’s the only way to do this.
I always recommend people to read the music, but hence it is rather overwhelming reading all fo the fur elise sheet music notation, which is why at the same time they are practicing Fur Elise, I also have them do other stuff that will allow them to practice reading, which is rather important to.
Such as from a book, or a very easy and simple arrangement.
Conclusion on Fur Elise Sheet Music
With that being said, Fur Elise is not an easy song, but my goal as an educator is to show people that it actually is easy. It’s not that overwhelming.
You can take your time to read the music, and it’s more important to actually read it than learn the song fast, however some students I have are really excited and just want to dive right in, which makes practicing reading difficult, and so I just have them focus on another chart or book to practice reading.
Have fun with this song and feel free to let me know in the comment section down below how things are going. We would love to hear from you and see how you’re making progress in the song.