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Piano sheet music for kids · Classical · Level 5: A wider range
The Blue Danube
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 3/4, 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 first waltz from Strauss’s Blue Danube (1867), the tune that rises up a chord and then rocks between two notes an octave apart. It is in 3/4, a bass note and two chords in the left hand, like Happy Birthday, and Strauss’s D major has become C major here. The right hand has to move: after the opening C E G it leaps from G up to the high G and back, and from bar 9 the same shape starts on B below middle C and leaps between the two As, so the tune covers more than an octave. Each four-bar phrase starts with three rising crotchets and then settles into minim-crotchet, minim-crotchet. The left hand is C for the first five bars, G7 for the next eight, and C to finish.
Practice tip: Practise the leaps alone: play G, then jump the whole hand up to the high G and back, until you can land without looking. Count “one two three” out loud and keep the third beat light; a waltz leans on the first beat.
A short history
Johann Strauss II wrote “An der schönen blauen Donau” in 1866, after Austria’s defeat by Prussia, as a choral waltz for the Vienna Men’s Choral Association, with a satirical text by the association’s poet Joseph Weyl. It was first sung on 15 February 1867 at the Dianabad in Vienna and was only a mild success; Strauss is said to have remarked that his only regret was for the coda.
Later that year he took it to the Paris World’s Fair as a purely orchestral piece and it swept Europe. Franz von Gernerth wrote the gentler words “Donau so blau” for it in 1890, and the waltz became Austria’s unofficial anthem, played every year at the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert.
Stanley Kubrick used it for the slowly turning space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Quick facts
- Tune
- Johann Strauss II, 1867
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 3/4
- Length
- 16 bars
- Tempo
- Swaying, crotchet = 138
- Difficulty
- Level 5: A wider range (piece 146 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
Questions and answers
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