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Piano sheet music for kids · Classical · Level 6: Moving on
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (The Nutcracker)
Free beginner piano sheet music: A minor, 2/4, 16 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
The Sugar Plum Fairy’s dance from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker (1892), written for the celesta, a small keyboard whose hammers strike metal bars so that it sounds like tiny bells. Tchaikovsky wrote it in E minor; here it is in A minor, with no sharps or flats in the key signature, and it creeps down by semitones: G, F sharp and F, each played three times. Most phrases start after a quaver (eighth note) rest with two quick semiquavers (sixteenth notes). In the last bar the right hand sparkles up E, G sharp, B, E in demisemiquavers (thirty-second notes) and lands on A. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord on each beat.
Practice tip: Play it very lightly and short, as if every note were a drop of water, and keep the repeated notes even. Count the quaver rest at the start of bars 1, 5, 9 and 13 so each phrase tiptoes in.
A short history
The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky’s last ballet, opened at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 18 December 1892, on a double bill with his opera Iolanta. It is set on Christmas Eve: a girl is given a nutcracker doll, which comes to life and takes her to the Land of Sweets, where the Sugar Plum Fairy rules. This is her dance in the second act. Nine months before the ballet opened, Tchaikovsky had already presented eight of its numbers, this one among them, as a concert suite.
The silvery sound is the celesta, invented in Paris by Auguste Mustel in 1886. Tchaikovsky came across it in Paris and had one sent to Russia, asking his publisher to keep it secret so that no other Russian composer could use it first.
The whole ballet took decades to catch on, but it has since become a Christmas tradition in many countries.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1892
- Key
- A minor
- Time signature
- 2/4
- Length
- 16 bars
- Tempo
- Lightly, crotchet = 72
- Difficulty
- Level 6: Moving on (piece 196 of 201)
- Type
- Classical
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
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