Funeral March in C minor, K. 453a, by Mozart
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 Funeral March in C minor, K. 453a
Here it is. Check your inbox for day 1.
- Hear it through at Slow (25 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 2 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in C minor. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- 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, 25 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (38 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.
About this piece
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.
How to play it
Take the Lento marking seriously and keep a steady, slow march pulse. Make the full chords sound weighty but never harsh, and let the chromatic bass notes be heard.
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.
Edition: Mutopia Project #446, in the public domain. Converted to MusicXML by Artform and checked note for note against the original.
More free Mozart sheet music
Who Mozart was
Austrian composer, a child prodigy paraded across European courts by his father before he was six, who grew into one of the most fluent composers who ever lived: symphonies, operas, and concertos that read as though they cost him no effort at all, though the manuscripts tell a more careful story. He wrote The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and the Requiem, left unfinished at his death at thirty-five and completed from his sketches by a student. The old story of his poverty and pauper's grave is mostly myth; what's true is a composer who could hold an entire opera in his head before setting down a note, and whose clarity still sounds inevitable, as if no other note could have come next.
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 C minor.