Piano music for a funeral
The pieces most often asked for, free to read and print, with nothing to buy.
Open the sheet music libraryIf you have been asked to play at a funeral, this is the music people ask for. Some of it is written for mourning: Chopin's march, the Lacrimosa, Elgar's Nimrod. Most of it is simply calm and well known, which is what a service usually wants, and what a family usually means when they ask for something gentle.
Every score here is out of copyright, so there is nothing to buy and no licence to worry about on a day nobody should be dealing with either. Print what you need for the stand, or play it from a tablet. If a piece is beyond you this week, open it and slow the playback down: these are mostly slow pieces, and slow is forgiving.
About the pieces
Amazing Grace
Written by John Newton, a slave-ship captain who renounced the trade and spent the rest of his life as a preacher: the words are his own story. The tune came later, from the American South, and swings on the three notes of a bugle call.
Marche funèbre
The slow movement of the B flat minor Sonata, written some years before the rest of the sonata was built around it. It was played at Chopin's own funeral at the Madeleine in Paris.
Prelude in C
The first page of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach's grand tour of every key, and there is not a single melody on it: just broken chords, changing one note at a time. It is harmony laid bare, and it has been the pianist's morning meditation for three centuries.
Gymnopédie No. 1
Satie was playing piano in Montmartre cafés when he wrote three pieces named after a dance of ancient Sparta. Against the perfumed excess of his era he set almost nothing: a swaying bass, a floating tune, and no hurry whatsoever.
Air on the G String
From Bach's third orchestral suite, renamed for a violinist who played it all on his lowest string. One long breath of a melody over a walking bass: it has opened weddings and closed films for a century.
Nimrod
The ninth of the Enigma Variations, a portrait of Elgar's friend and editor August Jaeger. Jaeger means hunter in German, and Nimrod is the hunter in Genesis, so the title is a joke about his name.
Gymnopédie No. 3
The third of the three slow dances Satie named after a festival of ancient Sparta. Debussy orchestrated the first and third, which is how they escaped obscurity.
Funeral March in C minor, K. 453a
Mozart wrote this tiny march in Vienna in 1784, in the notebook of his pupil Barbara Ployer, with the tongue-in-cheek title Marche funebre del Signor Maestro Contrapunto. It is only sixteen bars long, slow and serious, with a chromatic bass line.
Enigma Variations - XI. Nimrod
Elgar's portrait of his friend August Jaeger, whose German name means hunter, hence Nimrod the mighty hunter. It recalls an evening the two spent talking about Beethoven when Elgar was ready to give up composing.
Ave Maria
Schubert wrote it as a song for a lady in a Walter Scott poem, not for church, and the church adopted it anyway. The accompaniment's slow broken chords are the whole atmosphere.
Wagner - Elegy in Ab Major. WWV 93. {Professional production score.}
An elegy is a lament, written for someone or something lost.
Lacrimosa
Eight bars into this movement Mozart's manuscript stops: it is where death interrupted the Requiem he believed he was writing for himself. His student finished it; the world kept the grief.
Clair de Lune
Moonlight, from a poem by Verlaine about masked dancers who are almost, but not quite, sad. Debussy wrote it at twenty-eight and it has become the most famous quiet piece in the world: music that seems to arrive from somewhere rather than begin.