Prelude in F-sharp minor, Op. 23 No. 1, by Rachmaninoff
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Get the practice plan for Prelude in F-sharp minor, Op. 23 No. 1
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- Hear it through at Slow (28 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 F♯ minor. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: F♯7, G7, D7 and C♯7. 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, 28 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (42 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 3 minutes) 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 first of the ten Preludes, Op. 23 is a slow Largo, dark and quiet. A soft wandering accompaniment in the left hand supports a plain melody, and the piece ends with broken F-sharp minor chords fading downwards.
How to play it
Keep the left-hand figures very soft and connected with careful pedalling, changing where the bass note changes. The melody is simple, so let it breathe with the rit. and a tempo markings.
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 #1958, licensed CC BY-SA. Converted to MusicXML by Artform and checked note for note against the original.
More free Rachmaninoff sheet music
Who Rachmaninoff was
Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, and by his own reckoning one of music's last true Romantics, arriving into a century that was rapidly moving past him and refusing to follow. The failure of his First Symphony sent him into a depression so severe he stopped composing for three years, recovering only through hypnotherapy sessions with a doctor to whom he later dedicated his Second Piano Concerto. He fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution with almost nothing, rebuilt a career in the West largely as a touring pianist, and wrote comparatively little afterward, though what survives, the preludes and concertos, carries an unmistakable, aching lyricism shaped by his own enormous hands, which…
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♯ minor.