Für Elise Sheet Music

By popular demand, key-notes is offering the Für Elise sheet music for free download! This special, professionally typeset edition has been prepared just for key-notes visitors.

The German title "Für Elise" simply means "For Elise": Not only is "Für Elise" not even the piece's official title, music historians are not even sure Beethoven ever knew an Elise! Most likely, the piece was intended to be "For Therese," referring to Therese Malfatti to whom Beethoven proposed in 1810, which, incidentally, is the year Beethoven composed Für Elise. Ludwig Nohl discovered the piece in 1865 and it is assumed that Beethoven's handwriting in the title was hardly legible and that Nohl misread "Therese" as "Elise." This theory will hardly seem speculative to anyone who has ever seen Beethoven's handwriting! The manuscript is now lost, and we'll never know for sure.

Für Elise is actually a bagatelle, which simply means "trifle." Beethoven composed three full sets of bagatelles, one of them indeed so "trifling" that Beethoven's publisher deemed the pieces unworthy of the master!

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