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Piano sheet music for kids · Classical · Level 3: Notes below middle C
Spring (The Four Seasons)
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 10 bars and a pickup. 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 opening of Vivaldi’s Spring concerto (1725), the tune the whole orchestra plays to announce that spring has come. Vivaldi wrote it in E major; here it is in C major, so the right hand sits in C position with the thumb on middle C, stretching down to G in bar 3 and up to A in bars 7 to 9. It starts on a quaver (eighth note) pickup and uses pairs of quick semiquavers (sixteenth notes) and dotted crotchets. Bars 4 to 6 repeat bars 1 to 3 softly, as Vivaldi’s echo. The left hand plays a bass note and a chord, changing in the middle of the bar.
Practice tip: Play bars 1 to 3 loudly and bars 4 to 6 softly, like an echo across a field. The two quick semiquavers always lead into a long note, so do not rush them.
A short history
Antonio Vivaldi, a Venetian violinist and priest, published The Four Seasons in Amsterdam in 1725 as the first four concertos of a set of twelve called Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention). Each concerto came with a sonnet, possibly written by Vivaldi himself, describing the season, and the music follows the poem picture by picture.
Spring, in E major, opens with this ritornello for the whole orchestra: spring has arrived, says the sonnet. Then the solo violins imitate birdsong, a stream murmurs and a thunderstorm passes, with the ritornello coming back between each picture.
Vivaldi taught music for many years at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian home for orphaned girls whose orchestra was famous across Europe. Like most of his music, The Four Seasons was little played for nearly two hundred years after his death in 1741; today it is among the best-known music of the Baroque.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Antonio Vivaldi, 1725
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 10 bars and a pickup
- Tempo
- Allegro, crotchet = 100
- Difficulty
- Level 3: Notes below middle C (piece 98 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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