Scherzo In E Minor, by Mendelssohn
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 Scherzo In E Minor
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (30 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 E minor. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: B7, Cmaj7, Bmaj7 and Em. 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, 30 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (45 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 7 minutes) 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 scherzo means a joke, and is what replaced the polite minuet: same triple time, three times the speed, and a much darker sense of humour. Mendelssohn called his piano miniatures Songs Without Words, and meant it: they are songs with the singer's line given to the pianist.
How to play it
Feel a whole bar as one beat. Counting three at speed makes it plod when it should fly.
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 Mendelssohn sheet music
Who Mendelssohn was
German composer, pianist, and conductor, a prodigy on the level of Mozart, who at just twenty led the first performance of J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion since Bach's own death nearly a century earlier, single-handedly reviving interest in a composer who had been all but forgotten. Wealthy, cultured, and famously kind, he composed the Violin Concerto and the "Italian" Symphony with an effortless polish that some critics later held against him, as though ease were a flaw. His Songs Without Words for solo piano, brief, singing pieces without any actual words, invented a whole genre of Romantic miniature that composers were still writing decades after he died at just thirty-eight.
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 E minor.