It doesn’t seem to have the heart-rending quality that Pauer was looking for and, indeed, what we would hope not find in a set of bells! In his Transcendental Etudes, Liszt took A flat minor as the key for his etude on bells: La campanella. 4: Marche funebre in A-Flat Minor (Andrey Yaroshinsky, piano) Tchaikovsky: 6 Morceaux, composes sur un seul theme, Op. In this set, he goes through all the popular styles of the day: one movement is a fugue (showing his contrapuntal skills), and, along with the funeral march, there’s an impromptu, a mazurka, and a scherzo. This group of 6 pieces was dedicated to Anton Rubinstein and are a rare example of a virtuoso pianist showing off his compositional abilities, rather than his virtuosic skills. Tchaikovsky also wrote a funeral march in A flat minor, as part of his Op.21 collection. Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe (Murray Perahia, piano)

Beethoven himself arranged this movement for orchestra and it was played during Beethoven funeral procession in 1827.īeethoven: Piano Sonata No. That funeral march, however, is in C minor. The work was completed in 1801 and seems to anticipate the next funeral march he would write for his Eroica Symphony in 1803-4. When Pauer is referring to a ‘funeral march,’ he’s almost certainly referring to the march found in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. Pauer’s key characteristics for A flat minor is that it “adapts itself well to funeral marches, and is full of a sad and almost heart-rending expression in it we seem to hear the wailing of an oppressed and sorrowing heart.”

For the rest of the major and minor keys, he left us the attributes but not the list of pieces.

Liszt Credit: our earlier series on C major and minor, G major and minor, and D major and minor, and A major and minor, E major and minor, B major and minor, F sharp major and minor, and C sharp major and minor, we listed Ernst Pauer’s suggestions from 1876 of pieces that fit the particular affect he assigned for a key.