Beethoven  "Fur Elise". Common mistakes to avoid -Как играть "К Элизе" без обычных ошибок?1
Channel: Wannie Sing
Date: 26/02/2019

Let's imagine that you are a composer and you demand in court to exact (collect)  $ 100,000 from me for defaming your good name and undermining your business.

You claim that I'm doing this, playing fake notes and a fake rhythm on my record of your composition.

I say that I play everything exactly as you wrote.

How can a judge decide on our case with you?

A judge will bring a person to court who can write music with notes or use a program that does the same. Comparing the obtained record of my performance with the original, the judge immediately finds out who of us is right and who is a liar?

And I would lose my $ 100,000 even if I believed and argued that my fake performance is much better than your original music.

In this way, Beethoven would today become a billionaire only with his "To Elise" because almost no one plays Beethoven's authentic music, claiming to do so.

I did not find on Youtube a single pianist, who played in “Fur Elise”  the music written by the composer. Everyone I've heard substituted Beethoven's great music with his/her own cheap fictions, which are clearly much worse than Beethoven’s original. 

In this Video, I will point out for you and  play these mistakes, comparing them with the original. Because I want  you  to get rid of them. I fight with errors of this kind (of the others and my own) for many decades and I want to help those who make similar  mistakes or even do not even suspect them.

April 27, 1810 Beethoven wrote for a girl named Elise or Theresa (Beethoven’s handwriting was not legible), whom he loved and wanted to marry her (but was refused), the piece in her album  with the words "for a long memory."
And no one in the world knew this music for almost 60 years until 1867, when neither Beethoven nor this girl had long been alive.

In “For Elise” there is something magical. Several times people came to me and said that they were not interested in music and were not going to do it. They just wanted to learn how to play the first part “A” of this piece.

However, to do this, they had to learn so much interesting about music that they continued studying music and remained friends with music for life.

If we play the correct notes (Pitch) on the piano at the right Time and with the right Intensity (Intensity means: "the personal strength of each SEPARATE note”, but not the loudness (volume) of all the notes together), then our music is perfect. Unfortunately, the humans can not play like this, they ALWAYS do mistakes at least in one of these three: in Pitch, in Timing or in Intensity of the notes.


Let's start with the correct Pitch of the note in this piece. It would seem that it is impossible to make a mistake here, because everyone knows every note of “Fur Elise” and there are reliable publications.

However, Vladimir Ashkenazi and his followers manage to play a false note D (Re) instead of E (Mi) as many as seven times in b.b. 7, 15 and similar. Probably Vladimir skipped harmony lessons at the Moscow Conservatory or forgot that the Seventh D (Re) in V7 chord  can not under any circumstances be allowed to go upwards and be resolved into A (La) in classical harmony, especially for as much as five notes up.
Unfortunately, today some unscrupulous publishers are already printing these false notes “according to Ashkenazi” instead of checking with the first edition.  (Listen to this part of my Video).

Pianists often make mistakes in the bar 21, 22 and similar to them. They play "too many" or "not enough" repeats of the notes "E-D#" (Mi - Re#).  This problem does not arise at all if you use a modern metronome WITH A HUMAN VOICE and set it to 6/16 instead of 3/8 during the learning period. A student can count ALOUD on 6 and himself as well, if he is not too lazy to do so.  A count on 6 in each bar simply does not let the student to make a mistake here.


Beethoven did not write a single slur in this piece. All of them were invented by editors in order to increase their pay for the “intellectual property” they brought into Beethoven’s music. Therefore, the right place of these slurs is only in the garbage, they must be ignored, and it is better to get the edition without false slurs.


Judging from his music, Beethoven imagined Elise as an angel. And the angels play harp, as we know, but neither violins, cellos nor saxophones. To make the piano sound like a harp, we should play staccato, not legato.

The next issue is Timing = (Rhythm and Tempo).