The full piano score is on screen, aligned to the sound note by note. A minor, 2/4, quarter note = 126, both halves played twice, 0:56 in all. There is only one sixteenth-note figure in the whole piece — four sixteenths and an eighth, five notes to a group — and everything else is accompanying chords.
The hard part is not the run — it is the run arriving in the left hand
Most players can follow the right-hand run at first sight: four sixteenths and an eighth, five notes to a group, and the hand shape never changes.
What actually needs practising is bar 19. The whole run moves into the left hand, and at the same moment the right hand switches to a long note held for two beats. The two hands trade jobs across a single barline — the left goes from striking chords to running, the right from running to holding still. It happens twice (bars 19–24 and 35–40), and it is why this sits second in the book.
The left hand also has a passage written in treble clef (bars 17–19 as written, which the repeats place at bars 24–26 and again at 40–42), so on the lower stave those notes are read on ledger lines — four at the most.
Push it once and it swings back
The run always leaves from the same note, climbs a few steps, and comes back to where it started — like something hanging that has been pushed: out, and back. Push it once, it returns once.
Underneath, the chords land one to a beat, short and light, with no sustained note anywhere, so the whole piece stays afloat and never settles.
Only the last two bars break it: both hands rush downward at once, an octave apart, and stop at the lowest point in the piece.
The left hand goes two bars alone before the right arrives
The first two bars are left-hand chords alone; the right hand enters in bar 3. Those two bars are not an introduction — the repeat does not go back through them.
After that come two halves, each played twice, and the first half has two different endings (one for the first pass, another for the second). Written out, the piece is 33 bars; played, it is 55.
The sixteenth-note figure occupies 33 of those bars: 21 in the right hand and 13 in the left, with bar 54 counted in both. Its highest appearance climbs to the top note of the piece in bar 53, three bars from the end, and is answered immediately by the two-hand descent. From lowest note to highest, the piece spans exactly four octaves.
Twenty-five studies, and not one of them is called "Study No. N"
This comes from 25 Études faciles et progressives, Op. 100, published in Paris in 1851. All twenty-five have French names — Candour, Pastorale, The Limpid Stream, Farewell — and not one is called "Study No. N". Number 2 is called Arabesque, a word that originally meant an ornament: a single line winding back over itself, over and over.
The man who wrote the book was German. Burgmüller was born in Regensburg in 1806 and moved to Paris in 1832, at twenty-six; he never left, and died there in 1874. In Paris he wrote salon music, and he wrote for the ballet — the pas de deux added to Giselle for its 1841 premiere is his.
The studies are late work, and the only part of his output still played straight through today.
More pieces where one hand has a second job
Two other pieces here train the same thing — two hands doing different jobs: Bach's Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114 (the left hand holds notes for three beats), and the Canon in D, solo advanced (two lines in one right hand).
There are twenty-four more studies in Op. 100, and they will follow.
