Für Elise

A lost manuscript, an unknown Elise

Beethoven wrote this little bagatelle in A minor around 1810. He was nearly forty, it was the year of his music for Egmont, and he never published it. It doesn't even have an opus number: it is listed among his "works without opus number", as WoO 59.

The piece only came to light forty years after the composer's death. In 1867, the musicologist Ludwig Nohl published it in a collection of Beethoven's letters, from a manuscript he had copied in Munich and which came from the papers of Therese Malfatti. That manuscript has since been lost. At the top, according to Nohl, was a dedication: "Für Elise", for Elise.

Which leaves the question everyone asks: who was Elise? Nobody knows. Three leads keep coming back.

• Therese Malfatti, an eighteen-year-old pupil of Beethoven's, whom he hoped to marry that year. Beethoven's handwriting was so hard to read that Nohl may have taken "Therese" for "Elise": that is the theory of the musicologist Max Unger.
• Elisabeth Röckel, a singer from Beethoven's circle who was known as Elise, and who later married the composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel. This is Klaus Martin Kopitz's lead, and it is still debated.
• Elise Barensfeld, a very young singer, according to the musicologist Rita Steblin.

The little piece Beethoven never published has become one of the most played in the world: music boxes, phone ringtones, and even the garbage trucks of Taiwan, which play it in the streets so that everyone brings out their bags.

A refrain and two escapes

Für Elise is a rondo: a refrain comes back three times, separated by two episodes that change the mood. Its form fits in five letters, A B A C A.

• The refrain (A), in A minor. The melody wavers between E and D-sharp, two adjacent notes, before falling back to A. Behind this famous rocking, there are almost only two chords, A minor and E major, which the two hands share in arpeggios.
• The first episode (B) brightens up: it moves to F major, then C major, and the right hand takes off in fast runs.
• The refrain returns, unchanged.
• The second episode (C) darkens. The left hand hammers a low A, always the same note (a pedal point), under tense chords in D minor and B-flat. Then arpeggios climb and a chromatic scale comes back down, like a door closing.
• The refrain one last time, and a few bars to finish.

On the map below, I divide the piece more finely, phrase by phrase, so my letters are not the rondo's. To find your way, in the library's file the refrain takes up bars 1 to 24, 37 to 60, then 85 to the end; the first episode, bars 25 to 36; the second, bars 61 to 84, arpeggios and chromatic scale included.

How to approach it

I rate it as an advanced piece, but that is misleading: the refrain, which makes up more than half the piece, is within a beginner's reach. It's the two episodes that call for experience. Hence the order I suggest.

1. Listen while following the map, and count the returns of the refrain: three. Knowing where you are is already half the work of playing it from memory.
2. Set the chords before the arpeggios. Play A minor and E major as block chords, with both hands, in the rhythm of the refrain. When the arpeggios come, your hands already know where to go.
3. Polish the handover. In the refrain, the left hand starts the arpeggio (A, E, A) and the right hand finishes it (C, E, A). Work on this handover slowly, until it sounds like a single hand.
4. The first episode hides the fast runs I flag in bars 26-27, 32 and 34: nearly ten notes per second, with octave leaps. Take them slowly, in small groups, then speed up little by little; the plan raises the tempo for you.
5. The second episode rests on the repeated A in the left hand: keep your wrist loose and light; it's the same note coming back, no need to strike it. The chromatic scale that follows has a simple fingering: thumb on the white keys, middle finger on the black keys, index finger between two adjacent white keys (E-F, B-C).
6. A little pedal, changed with each chord, and no rushing in the refrain: its gentleness is all its charm.

Since the refrain comes back three times, you'll know more than half the piece by heart as soon as you know it. Only two episodes will remain, and that's how my plan moves forward: the map, the chord framework, each section phrase by phrase, the tricky passages, then everything put together and brought up to tempo.