Fur Elise is a very popular piano solo by Beethoven and many piano beginners want to learn how to play this piano sheet music. If you are committed to learn this composition even if you are a beginner piano student you have to practice in a way that will make the composition musically enjoyable. Here are a few tips on how to practice the piano notes to create a musical performance!

Beginner motivation

Many beginner piano students want to play this piano solo hearing other beginning pianist making the endeavor but this composition  only appears to be fairly easy. Technically it is not very rapid passages in the music notes but the actual musical interpretation of the piece often seems to be on a musical level that only appeals to the player himself.

If you insist on learning this piece of music even if you are a note reading beginner but have the motivation necessary, what can you do? Here are some suggestions from my own experience with having motivated beginner music students!

Listen to Fur Elise

The most important part of learning this piano piece is to create music as you perform. This is a piece of music that has been played so many times by people who just barely made it through. They played on a very basic musical level because they were not really prepared musically to play this piece of music. Fur Elise contains hidden musical challenges for the piano beginner even if the sheet music appears to be fairly easy technically.

I suggest that you listen to a good piano performer that will help you understand how to create music and making music notes come alive. There are many versions of this piece available so you can listen to it with the aim to find the music that is hidden behind the notes! This will be your most important preparation!

The goal with listening is not to be able to copy the actual interpretation of Fur Elise from someone else but rather to help you be more aware of the music that is played and hear the composition in its musical context and of course enjoy the composition and let these feelings be present as you practice.

You learn what you practice

There are many ways to practice and learn a piano piece. How you practice will determine the results. If you know how to play piano notes fairly well you might play through the piece from beginning to end and you will have practiced reading piano sheet music but will probably never learn Fur Elise good enough to be able to perform in front of an audience.

I suggest that you practice one bar or maybe two at a time first with your right hand only and then your left until you can play the bars with ease and then you can proceed by slowly playing the bars with both hands. Connect the bars you have mastered as you go along!

To commit to memory or not

The Fur Elise piano sheet music can be played perfectly by a skilled pianist by just reading the music notes but ordinary beginner piano students will probably not learn to play this way because of poor sight reading skills. If you insist in learning the melody on a performance level I suggest that you commit the melody to memory as you practice the bars one at a time. Later on you can connect the memorized bars until you master the whole composition.

The biggest mistake is to make mistakes

I suggest that you always practice the piano sheet music slowly enough so that sloppiness will not creep into your playing. When you play slowly and correctly you will begin creating new pathways in your mind. If you play faster than your present piano skills allow you or if you start to play sloppy or without concentration you will make mistakes that will pollute these pathways and slow down your progress.

Create music as you practice

As you learn Fur Elise one or two bars at a time, learning to play the right keys and memorizing you might as well memorize your musical interpretation. That is, practice the mastered bars the way you would play them in front of an audience!

The most important part of learning to play piano is actually to create music that you yourself and your audience want to listen to. If you practice every bar with this musical goal in your mind you will enjoy the journey as well as the accomplished goal to learn how to play Fur Elise as a musically enjoyable piece of piano sheet music!