Short piano pieces

The piano was invented around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence; its full name, pianoforte, means soft-loud, which is exactly what its hammers allowed and the harpsichord could not do. By 1800 it was the most important instrument for music at home and in the concert hall.

Besides sonatas, composers wrote a great many single pieces for it, most of them short and often published in sets: this is the rest of piano music. Many are character pieces, each holding one mood or idea, and the title tells you which.

A nocturne is a night piece: a singing melody over a broken-chord accompaniment, a type the Irish composer John Field began and Chopin made his own. A bagatelle, French for trifle, is short and light. An étude, a study, works at one skill, although Chopin’s études are concert pieces too. An impromptu sounds as if made up on the spot, a prelude states one idea and stops, and dances such as the waltz and the mazurka became pieces for listening.

The same singing style lives inside larger works. Beethoven marked the slow movement of his Pathétique Sonata Adagio cantabile, slow and singing. One long melody comes back three times between two contrasting episodes, so the returning melody is the landmark.

Schumann’s first twenty-three published works are all for piano, many of them sets of character pieces such as Carnaval and Kinderszenen. When he turned to song, the piano kept the last word: many songs of his cycle Dichterliebe end with a piano postlude, a short piano piece in all but name.