Barcarolle, easy (arr. Wilson Manhire), by Offenbach
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 Barcarolle, easy (arr. Wilson Manhire)
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- Hear it through at Slow (50 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 2 big beats to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in F major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: F, C7, C and F6. 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, 50 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (75 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
The Barcarolle is the best-known music in Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, a love duet sung in a gondola as the Venice act opens. Offenbach had first written the tune years earlier for another stage work and brought it back here; he died in 1880, four months before the opera's first night.
How to play it
Feel two slow swings to the bar rather than six beats, and keep the rocking left hand soft and even so the tune floats over it like the boat on the water.
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 Offenbach sheet music
Who Offenbach was
German-born cellist who moved to Paris, could not get his stage works produced, and solved the problem by leasing his own theatre. What came out of it was the operetta: fast, funny, and rude about the powerful, and enormously popular. The can-can everybody knows is the galop from his underworld send-up of the Orpheus myth. He worked himself to death chasing one serious opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, and died months before its premiere with the last act unfinished.
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 F major.