La Traviata: Prelude to Act 1, by Verdi
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 La Traviata: Prelude to Act 1
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 4 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in E major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: Bm, F♯, F♯maj7 and D♯dim7. 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, 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 4 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
Verdi's La Traviata was first performed in Venice in 1853. The prelude begins with a quiet B minor Adagio, then turns to E major for the great tune Violetta sings in Act 2, Amami, Alfredo, and this piano transcription is by N. Toledo from a Spanish edition of the 1850s or 1860s.
How to play it
Keep the opening very soft and still. When the big tune comes, let it sing over the left hand's broken chords.
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 #1213, in the public domain. Converted to MusicXML by Artform and checked note for note against the original.
More free Verdi sheet music
Who Verdi was
Italian composer of twenty-eight operas and the closest thing the nineteenth century had to a national hero: crowds chanted his name in the street as a coded call for Italian unification. He lost his wife and both children in the space of two years as a young man and nearly stopped composing altogether. Late in life he built and endowed a rest home in Milan for musicians who had run out of money, and said, with everything else he had done, that it was the finest work he had ever accomplished.
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 major.