Für Elise

Like most piano students at his level, my kid is now learning Beethoven’s Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor for solo piano, better known to the world as “Für Elise.” Or more accurately, he’s learning part of it. There turn out to be more sections than the iconic minor-key hook we’re all familiar with. These sections are weirdly disjointed from the main hook.

When I pointed out on Twitter how strange it is that there are all these other parts, a former student responded:

That’s pretty funny. It’s not clear exactly who Elise was, but a likely candidate was a student of Beethoven’s. She was eighteen when he was forty, which, gross.

Jimmy Rotheram has some useful advice for would-be performers of the piece.

Kidding aside, the hook is pretty accessible, except for the rhythm. I’m not hearing much music in 3/8 time these days, so it’s not very intuitive for me. In classical tradition, the bottom number in the time signature is an indication of how fast you’re supposed to play. Smaller numbers mean you play slower, and bigger numbers mean you play faster. European composers historically used 3/8 for uptempo dances like the gigue (the one that sounds like “meedly meedly meedly.”)

The basic triple meter in “Für Elise” is not all that complicated, but the piece starts on the last beat of the measure, not the first. You can count along in a nice simple “one and two and three and,” but you have to start counting on “three and.” This takes some mental adjustment. To help myself feel the groove, I put Van Cliburn’s recording into Ableton Live and warped it out over some beats. Enjoy.

I also enjoy this guy’s ragtime version.

Anyway, I look forward to having that hook stuck in my head for the next month or so until the kid has moved on to the next canonical landmark.