Serenade Haydn, by Haydn
Every score here is public domain, free to read, print and keep. Open it in the browser and it plays, at whatever tempo you can read it.
Get the practice plan for Serenade Haydn
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (31 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 4 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in D major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: D, G, Dmaj7 and A7. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 31 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (46 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (about 1 minute) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
What kind of piece this is
A serenade is an evening song, sung under a window, and its piano writing usually imitates a plucked accompaniment.
How to play it
Keep the accompaniment light and detached like a guitar, and let the melody carry all the sustain.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
More free Haydn sheet music
Who Haydn was
Austrian composer who spent thirty years in near isolation as house musician to the Esterházy princes, and used the time to invent, more or less single-handedly, the symphony and the string quartet as later composers would understand them. Cut off from fashion, he wrote, in his own words, because he was forced to become original. He taught Beethoven, who found him infuriating, and he was funny on purpose: the Surprise Symphony's chord exists to wake up an audience that had eaten too well. The tune he wrote for the Emperor is now the German national anthem.
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including D major.