Rachmaninoff's Italian Polka — written in 1906, originally for two people at one keyboard, on a tune he is said to have heard a street band play in Italy and noted down on the spot. A man used to writing large things also wrote this: two minutes twenty-six, one rhythmic figure holding it up from end to end, brighter as it goes. At bar 33 the key signature drops from six flats to three, and the colour of the whole piece turns over there. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
Something he heard on a street in Italy
In 1906 Rachmaninoff took his family to Italy for the summer. The tune of this piece is said to have come from a street there — a travelling band playing a dance, which he noted down and later worked up as a piano duet. That origin is the received account rather than his own record, which is why it is offered as a story rather than a fact.
The word Italian in the title points to where the tune came from, not to a style. The polka itself is Bohemian, the dance that swept European ballrooms in the mid-nineteenth century; what Rachmaninoff wrote is neither Bohemian nor Russian, but the thing he heard in Italy.
The original scoring is for four hands — two players at one instrument, one taking the upper register and one the lower. It was the commonest form of music-making at home, and how nineteenth-century households heard symphonies. The later solo version folds two players into one pair of hands, which is why the texture here is thicker than the original.
Among his works this one is an outlier. He is known for long, thick concertos and preludes; this is two and a half minutes, light, springy, and faintly comic in the middle — and one of the most played of his miniatures.
One rhythm, getting brighter all the way
It starts light: only nine to twelve notes a bar, the right hand stating the dance tune while the left sets down the beat one note at a time. That press-and-spring rhythm begins in the first bar and never changes.
After 0:22 the density climbs — a dozen notes a bar becomes two dozen, the right hand adds ornaments and octaves, and the same tune starts getting dressed.
At 0:56 comes the springiest stretch of all: twenty-seven to thirty-seven notes a bar, both hands moving, as though a whole band had joined in.
Around 1:31 it suddenly thins, leaving a single line, and then builds back layer by layer — the piece loosens and tightens like this three times over.
The last bars slow down noticeably; bar 117 has just seven notes, like a bow before the ballroom empties, and the final four lift once more and close.
This works well as background: no loud passage and no long silence, a steady tempo and a mood that keeps rising. Good for mornings, or when you need lifting.
One hundred and twenty-two bars and four changes of key signature
One hundred and twenty-two bars and two thousand six hundred and ninety-four sounding notes, with seventeen grace notes besides, in 2/4 and with no repeats. The score carries eighteen dynamics and twenty-one hairpins, and no pedal marks at all.
The key signature changes four times on the page: six flats at the head, three from bar 33, six again from bar 65, three from bar 81, and six once more at bar 120. What you hear is dark, bright, dark, bright, dark.
The bar-by-bar counts mark the three build-ups clearly. Bars 1 to 14 run between nine and twelve notes, the thinnest of the piece; from bar 17 the count climbs to between fifteen and twenty-five; bars 41 to 48 reach twenty-seven to thirty-seven. Bar 81 falls back to fourteen, bars 89 onward return to twenty-six to thirty-one, bar 97 drops again to thirteen, and from bar 98 the count holds around twenty to the close.
Bars 32, 41 and 57 each hold thirty-seven notes, the highest bar counts in the piece.
The range runs from B-flat 0 to G7, just over six octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.021 seconds — that is a grace note, not a beat you have to land on.
The difficulty is lightness, not speed
First, keep the left hand light. It sets the beat all the way through, and the moment it gets heavy the dance becomes a march. Loose wrist, shallow fingertips, underneath rather than in front.
Second, do not let the right hand's ornaments steal the beat. The decoration thickens as the piece goes on, but those notes hang on the tune rather than replacing it; you should always know where the original line is.
Third, grade the three rounds. The piece loosens and tightens three times, and spending everything on the first leaves the other two flat. Hold the first back.
Fourth, the passages in six flats. Many flats mean many black keys, so set the hand shape in advance; the join at bar 33, where the signature drops to three, is the easiest place to trip.
Fifth, the slowing at the end. Bar 117 holds only seven notes — that deceleration is written, so do not start slowing early.
The tempo is 100 to the quarter. No metronome mark is printed in this source, where bar 1 carries only Allegretto, and the other encoding in the corpus prints none at bar 1 either; the figure comes from the low end of the conventional band for that marking, and the recording runs 2 minutes 23.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
His other miniatures, and other light things
Rachmaninoff appears here for the first time on this channel. He wrote several other short piano pieces — the Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 3 No. 2, the Prelude in G, Op. 32 No. 5, and pieces from the Études-Tableaux — none of them made yet.
If you like something that climbs all the way and leaves you better than it found you, the channel also has Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, another dance rhythm at a similar length, and Mozart's Rondo alla turca.
