Für Elise was never published in Beethoven's lifetime. It surfaced forty years after his death, when a scholar found the manuscript among a family's belongings, copied it out and had it printed — and after that the original was never seen again. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
Nobody knows who Elise was
Ludwig Nohl, who copied the manuscript out, said the heading read "Für Elise am 27 April zur Erinnerung von L. v. Bthvn" — for Elise, 27 April, in remembrance, from Beethoven. The year is usually placed at 1810.
The trouble is that no Elise can be firmly placed in Beethoven's life. Three named scholars, three answers. One: Nohl misread the word, and it was "Therese" — Therese Malfatti, whom Beethoven had proposed to around that time and who turned him down, and among whose family's belongings the manuscript turned up. Two: the singer Elisabeth Röckel, who went by Elise and who left Vienna in April 1810. Three: a young girl named Elise Barensfeld, a reading few others have accepted.
Each has supporters. Each has objectors. It has never been settled.
One more thing: this may not be the version Beethoven wanted last. In 1822 he went back to the piece and rewrote it, shifting the whole left-hand accompaniment later and adding bars to the passage into the middle section. What everyone plays today is still the 1810 version, because that is the one Nohl copied.
In Taiwan this means the garbage truck is coming
Taiwan's garbage trucks play two pieces of music: Bądarzewska's A Maiden's Prayer, and this one.
In 1968 Taiwan imported twenty-one sealed garbage trucks from Germany with the tune already installed; another account has a health minister hearing his daughter practise it at home and choosing it as the signal for collection. Neither account has documentation behind it.
For a great many Taiwanese this is the first classical music they ever heard and the piece they have heard most — not in a concert hall, but at the end of the lane around dinner time.
Two notes going back and forth, not moving on
At the top of the score Beethoven wrote only Poco moto — a little motion, no more.
And that is exactly what the opening is: two notes trading places, up a little, down a little, up again, like a hand reaching out and pulling back. When it finally moves on it does not get far; a turn or two and it is back on those same two notes.
Partway through, the light comes up for a moment, and then goes down again.
The unsettled part comes later: one note underneath that will not let go, the harmony pressing upward a step at a time, until the right hand runs to the highest point in the piece and slides all the way back down.
When it lands, those two notes are waiting. It stops on the lowest note of all.
Those two notes turn over forty-two times
The opening E and D♯ are a semitone apart. With every repeat played, that pair turns over forty-two times across the piece — the sense that it keeps ending up where it started is not your imagination.
The shape is a five-part rondo: theme, middle, theme, another section, theme. The middle moves to F major, the one place the piece clearly brightens.
The fourth part sits lowest: the bass holds a single A for twelve bars without changing, then climbs a semitone at a time — A, A♯, B, C — pushing the section to its peak.
Just before the end the right hand stacks the home chord upward three octaves to the highest note in the piece, then slides back down through eighteen chromatic steps. The last sound is the lowest A of all.
The opening is the easy part
In the opening both hands stay near the middle of the keyboard — single notes on the right, three-note broken chords on the left, one position, no jumps.
The difficulty is in the two sections that follow. In the middle section, in F major, the right hand has to shape ornaments inside a run of thirty-second notes while the left hand changes inversions underneath. In the section after that the left hand repeats one note without stopping while the right hand still has to sing the melody — two different jobs at the same tempo.
The closing descent is eighteen chromatic steps; if the fingering slips it trips, and it sits at the brightest point in the piece.
We rate this 2 out of 5, which is an average across the whole piece. What usually happens is that the opening comes quickly and the middle section is where people stop.
What to play after those two notes
Same idea — one small figure turned over and over with something circling underneath: the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Same sparseness, easy to leave on: Bach's Prelude in C, BWV 846, and Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1.
Beethoven writing that same refusal to move on in another way: the second movement of the Pathétique.
