Ludwig van Beethoven – Bagatelle in A minor "Für Elise" (Analysis)

Historic fortepiano with a handwritten score for an analysis of Beethoven’s Für Elise
Beethoven’s Für Elise, WoO 59, grows from the fragile uncertainty of its opening E–D-sharp figure into a recurring musical journey, while its history remains bound to a lost manuscript and the unresolved mystery of “Elise.”
 

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Two neighbouring notes are enough to identify Für Elise. E and D-sharp alternate for a few moments before the tonality has fully settled, as though the music were hesitating before revealing its direction. Within seconds, one of the most enduring musical fingerprints in the Western tradition has already taken shape.

Behind this extraordinarily familiar opening, however, lies a work with an unusually complicated history. We do not know with certainty who “Elise” was, we cannot prove that the famous dedication was written by Beethoven himself, and we no longer possess the completed autograph from which the first edition was derived. The musical text we know today reached us through a posthumous chain of copying and publication.

The history of the piece stretches across nearly fifteen years. The first form of the theme appears in 1808, as a sixteen-bar sketch in a notebook associated with the Pastoral Symphony. In the spring of 1810, Beethoven returned to the material and entered a much more developed draft in the manuscript now known as BH 116. From this, he appears to have produced the completed autograph that was later lost. In 1822, while gathering earlier short pieces for a new collection of bagatelles, he reopened the old draft, marked it “No. 12” and began revising it. The new version remained unfinished, and the piece was ultimately left out of the collection later published as Op. 119.

The lost completed manuscript resurfaced in 1865, when the musicologist Ludwig Nohl found it in Munich in the possession of Babette Bredl. He was allowed to copy and publish it. Two years later, Für Elise appeared in print for the first time. According to Nohl, the top of the manuscript bore the inscription “Für Elise am 27 April zur Erinnerung von L. v. Bthvn”. Both the autograph itself and Nohl’s working copy later disappeared, leaving the 1867 edition as the principal source for the familiar form of the piece.

Despite its small scale, Für Elise follows a remarkably organised inner journey. The principal theme returns repeatedly, while two intervening episodes move progressively farther from its initial delicacy. The music travels from fragile uncertainty into brighter territory, then into a much darker intensity, and finally back to its point of departure. The same theme returns, but our experience of hearing it has changed.

Movements / Structure

The piece is a single movement marked Poco moto, in 3/8. Its form is rondo-like, A–B–A–C–A, with the opening section functioning as a recurring refrain. Measure numbers follow modern critical numbering.

A – Principal theme in A minor (mm. 1–22)

The piece opens pianissimo with the characteristic semitone alternation E–D-sharp. From this tiny motion grows a lyrical period supported by broken chords shared between the two hands. A brief turn towards C major brightens the middle of the section before the music returns to A minor.

B – First episode, from F major towards C major (mm. 23–38)

F major brings a warmer colour and greater melodic breadth. The texture becomes more continuous, rapid passagework appears and the motion acquires a more outward character. Towards the end, the harmony gathers again around E and prepares the return to A minor.

A – First return of the principal theme (mm. 39–58)

The opening material returns almost unchanged. After the mobility of the first episode, the delicate E–D-sharp alternation sounds like a return to familiar ground. Balance is temporarily restored before the most intense region of the piece begins.

C – Second episode, a dark expansion within A minor (mm. 59–82)

A persistently repeated A in the bass creates a stable tonal foundation, while the chords above it project a strong subdominant and D-minor colouring. The bass then descends chromatically, harmonic pressure increases and the music comes to a complete halt. Out of the silence emerges an ascending A-minor arpeggio followed by a chromatic descent that leads back to the opening figure.

A – Final return and close (mm. 83–103)

The refrain returns for the last time without further dramatic expansion. The music regains its original delicacy and ends with a simple cadence in A minor. There is no extended coda; the piece closes within the same familiar sonic space from which it began.

Analysis

A – Uncertainty before melody

The opening of Für Elise does not establish the tonic immediately. E, the fifth degree of A minor, alternates with its chromatic lower neighbour D-sharp. The tonic A is absent at first; the listener encounters suspension before resolution.

The alternation is not simply an ornamental trill. The placement of the sixteenth notes against the 3/8 metre creates a subtle metric ambiguity: the phrase seems to hover before the pulse fully settles. This instability is an essential part of the opening’s character and helps explain why an overly square performance can easily strip it of naturalness.

When the melody resolves onto A, the accompaniment appears as a chain of broken chords that begins low and continues into the right hand. Melody and harmony are not heard as two completely separate layers; they merge into a single pianistic motion. Balance between the hands is therefore crucial: the arpeggiated background must support the melody without weighing down its flow.

The first period is shaped as a compact question-and-answer sequence. The E–D-sharp figure reappears before the next phrase, creating a small cycle of waiting, descent and arrival. Repetition fixes the theme in memory, while the arpeggios create the impression that the melody is emerging from the harmony itself.

Within the refrain, the music turns towards C major, the relative major of A minor. The change is not presented as a dramatic break. The melody opens upward into a higher register, the harmonic colour brightens, and the motion gradually gathers again around E, from which the opening semitone attraction will reappear.

The famous opening therefore functions as more than a recognisable “signal.” E and D-sharp form a mechanism of expectation and return. Each time they reappear, the listener senses that the music has again reached the threshold from which A minor can return.

B – The first move into light

The first episode begins in F major, the sixth degree of the opening A minor. The sound world changes immediately. The melody gains more room, the phrases broaden and the accompaniment moves with greater continuity, pushing the music forward.

Despite the contrast, the new material does not sound unrelated. Small upward motions towards neighbouring notes and the subsequent descending contours retain a distant kinship with the kinetic idea of the opening. Beethoven creates contrast without losing coherence.

The harmonic path moves towards C major, where rapid thirty-second-note passagework ornaments cadential gestures. Here it becomes clear that Für Elise is not, across its full span, the simple student piece its reputation often suggests. The writing demands lightness, clarity and control so that speed remains a continuation of the phrase rather than an isolated display of virtuosity.

The brighter region does not last. In the closing measures, E returns with increasing insistence, and D-sharp restores the semitone attraction familiar from the opening. The return of A can therefore be recognised even before the entire theme reappears: the music has already activated its sonic “return signal.”

A – The theme as memory

The first return is musically almost identical to the opening presentation, yet its place within the form has changed its function. At first, the theme was new; now it is recognised. After the brighter harmony, continuous motion and rapid passagework of the first episode, its simplicity acquires a different transparency.

This is one of the central strengths of rondo-like form: the material does not need to be radically transformed in order to acquire new meaning. The experience of what has intervened is enough. The principal theme provides stability again, but only temporarily. The most significant dramatic change in the piece still lies ahead.

C – The dark region of the piece

The second episode transforms the texture completely. A repeated low A establishes an insistent tonal foundation, while the right hand answers with denser chords and a sharper rhythmic profile. Above this fixed A, the region of D minor is strongly projected, giving the episode a pronounced subdominant shadow without breaking its deeper connection to A minor.

The contrast with A is striking. There, harmony flowed through light arpeggiation; here the bass note persists, and the chords seem to accumulate weight above it. The bass then abandons its stability and begins to descend chromatically. The sensation changes: the ground is no longer fixed but gives way step by step.

Within this descent appears B-flat major, with its characteristic Neapolitan colouring in the context of A minor. Harmonic pressure reaches the point at which the piece’s continuous motion is interrupted. For the first time, the music arrives at a genuine halt.

The silence is brief, but its role is decisive. From this gap begins, pianissimo, an ascending A-minor arpeggio that sweeps quickly across the keyboard. In the upper register, the direction reverses and a chromatic descent begins to lead the music downward.

The passage can sound like a momentary improvisatory outburst, yet its direction is highly controlled. At the end of the descent, the familiar E–D-sharp appears once more. In two notes, the entire world of the opening theme returns.

To follow this section by ear, three landmarks are enough: the persistent low note, the chromatic descent of the bass, and the sweeping arpeggio that leads back to the opening figure.

A – A return without triumph

The final return is not presented as a grand solution or triumphant recapitulation. The theme comes back at its original dynamic level and regains the intimacy of pianissimo. After the compact pressure of the second episode, its delicacy sounds even more fragile.

This is essential to the balance of the piece. The dramatic climax has already occurred; Beethoven does not try to surpass it. He returns instead to the small musical object with which the work began, allowing recognition to carry more weight than any new climax.

The piece ends with a clear cadence in A minor, without an added coda or final dramatic statement. The circle closes, yet the sense of the opening uncertainty has not disappeared entirely. The music has returned to its point of origin after passing through two very different worlds.

Bagatelle, album leaf or piano piece?

The work’s designation is less straightforward than the familiar title “Bagatelle No. 25” suggests. Ludwig Nohl introduced the piece in 1867 as a small Klavierstück, a piano piece. The first separate edition, issued in 1870 by C. F. Kahnt in Leipzig, described it as a Leichtes Clavierstück—an “easy piano piece.”

In later editorial and performance tradition, the term bagatelle became widespread, while Albumblatt, or “album leaf,” also appears. The word “bagatelle” is musically plausible: Beethoven had already turned this apparently minor genre into a field of remarkable expressive concentration, and in 1822 he did indeed consider WoO 59 for inclusion in a new collection of bagatelles.

The familiar number “No. 25” is a later numbering and does not come from Beethoven. It does not identify the work’s place in any authentic cycle conceived by the composer. For that reason, the safest musicological designation remains Für Elise, WoO 59, where WoO stands for Werke ohne Opuszahl—works without opus number.

The word “bagatelle” should not, however, be mistaken for a judgement of musical insignificance. In Beethoven, small scale can coexist with extreme economy of material, dense formal organisation and subtle expressive change. Für Elise is a characteristic example.

From 1808 to 1822: a work without a final form

The surviving documents allow us to distinguish at least three stages in the creative history of Für Elise.

The first belongs to 1808. In a sketchbook associated with the Pastoral Symphony, Beethoven wrote down a sixteen-bar early version of the theme. It is not yet the piece we know, but the basic melodic core is already present.

In the spring of 1810, the material was developed much further in manuscript BH 116. The draft contains gaps, corrections and passages that have not yet acquired the clarity of a final score, but it is advanced enough to explain how the completed autograph later seen by Nohl could have emerged from it. Beethoven appears to have given away that manuscript without keeping a copy.

In 1822, he returned not to the fair copy but to the old 1810 draft. He was planning a new collection of short pieces and marked Für Elise as “No. 12.” He began to rethink the accompaniment, transitions and organisation of several sections.

One of the most interesting changes concerns the opening A section: the accompaniment is displaced rhythmically in relation to the melody, creating even greater independence between phrase and strong beat. Other notes suggest new transitions and altered relationships between episodes. Beethoven did not, however, complete these ideas in a new fair-copy score.

It is therefore important to distinguish the 1822 revision from the so-called “1822 version” heard in some modern recordings. The latter is a scholarly reconstruction, most notably associated with Barry Cooper: it uses Beethoven’s authentic revision notes but requires editorial decisions in order to turn them into a continuous performable piece.

The established 1810 version therefore remains the basis of the present analysis. Even this text, however, is not free from problems because the completed autograph and Nohl’s copy no longer survive.

A small example shows why critical scrutiny matters. In measure 7, Nohl’s edition prints E where draft BH 116 gives D, and all corresponding later appearances of the phrase also use D. The first separate edition of 1870 already corrected the note, and modern critical editions generally follow the same reading.

Thus, even in a work that millions of pianists feel they have “always known,” a fundamental musicological question remains: what exactly was the text Beethoven left behind?

Who was Elise?

The short answer is: we do not know.

The fact that the lost manuscript was connected with the estate of Therese Malfatti made her the earliest and most widely known candidate. Beethoven knew the Malfatti family in 1810, and his relationship with Therese was close enough to make the association initially plausible.

In 1922/23, Max Unger proposed that Ludwig Nohl had simply misread Beethoven’s difficult handwriting and that the dedication actually said Für Therese. The explanation was attractive because it seemed to solve both the provenance of the manuscript and the mystery of the name at once.

Palaeographic examination, however, has seriously weakened that theory. Beethoven’s forms of the initial combinations “Th” and “El” differ enough to make such a simple misreading difficult to sustain. Therese Malfatti remains central to the history of the manuscript’s transmission, but that does not prove that she was “Elise.”

Other scholars have proposed different candidates. Klaus Martin Kopitz connected the name with Elisabeth Röckel, a singer and friend of Beethoven who was also associated with the name Elise. Rita Steblin proposed Elise Barensfeld, a young singer and child prodigy in the circle of Johann Nepomuk Mälzel who may, in her hypothesis, have been indirectly linked to Therese Malfatti. Both cases involve suggestive biographical coincidences, but neither is supported by direct evidence linking the proposed woman to the specific manuscript.

An even more radical interpretation was proposed by Jürgen May. The dedication reported by Nohl gave the date “27 April” without a year. That date is exactly the date on which Therese Malfatti—by then Therese von Droßdick—died, on 27 April 1851.

May suggested that both the date and the name “Elise” may have been added around 1851–1852 by a later owner of the manuscript, Joseph Rudolph Schachner, the son of Babette Bredl. On this reading, “Elise” would have been his future wife Elisabeth Wendling, and the inscription would have been connected with the memory of Therese. If this hypothesis is correct, the famous dedication was not written by Beethoven at all.

This interpretation is important, but it remains hypothetical. The autograph that might have allowed scholars to examine the ink, handwriting and placement of the dedication has disappeared.

The safest conclusion is therefore also the least sensational: the identity of “Elise” remains unknown. The name belongs to the transmission history of the work, not to a securely documented romantic story that can explain the music.

Why does this melody remain in memory?

The recognisability of Für Elise cannot be explained only by its immense later circulation. The opening material itself contains features that strongly favour memory.

At first, it is reduced almost entirely to two notes. The interval between them is a semitone, one of the strongest forms of melodic attraction in tonal music. The tiny figure reappears before subsequent phrases and quickly becomes a recognisable sonic imprint.

The first period also has enough internal clarity and symmetry to be isolated, repeated and recognised even outside the context of the complete piece. This quality helped the melody acquire a second life far beyond the concert hall: in teaching collections, music boxes, toys, electronic signals and countless uses in popular culture.

Cultural repetition intensified what the musical material itself had already made easy to remember. Over time, the opening measures became so familiar that they were almost detached from the rest of the work.

This has also produced a misconception. The complete piece is considerably more demanding than its opening. The rapid passagework of the first episode, the dense chords of the second, the register changes and—above all—the need to give different functions to the three appearances of the same theme all require mature control of sound and phrasing.

The greatest difficulty of Für Elise does not lie in speed. It lies in preserving natural flow, lightness, metric flexibility and inner coherence in a work that the listener believes they already know before it has even begun.

💡 Musical Detail

Munich, 14 July 1865.

Babette Bredl possesses a Beethoven manuscript that had passed through the estate of Therese Malfatti. On that day, it is formally recorded that she allowed the musicologist Ludwig Nohl to copy the small piano piece from the original autograph and publish it.

For Nohl, this is not the revelation of a lost major masterpiece. Before him lies a short piano piece, elegant and agreeable, but apparently slight beside the symphonies, sonatas and quartets that had already secured Beethoven’s place in history.

And yet there is something on the first page that raises a question.

At the top of the manuscript he reads a name:

Elise.

Nohl tries to determine who she might have been. He even asks Therese Malfatti’s elderly sister, but she remembers no Elise who fits the story. The question remains open.

The musicologist does what he can do. He copies the notes.

There is no photographic reproduction to accompany his work, and no second autograph that would allow a future scholar to check every detail. For a few hours or days, the musical text passes from Beethoven’s paper into the hand of a man who cannot know how important this act of copying will become.

Two years later, in 1867, Nohl publishes the piece in Neue Briefe Beethovens. He does not present it as a major discovery. Among letters and other documents concerning the composer’s life, one more small piano work simply enters public view.

Sometime later, the original manuscript disappears.

Nohl’s copy disappears as well.

None of the musicologists who spend the following decades trying to discover who “Elise” was will ever be able to look again at that first page. No one will be able to examine the name, compare its ink with the notes, or verify whether every detail of the 1867 edition was copied correctly.

The paper vanishes.

The music, by contrast, begins its own journey.

It passes from edition to edition, from salons to conservatories and from teachers to students. Children play it while only beginning to discover the piano; major pianists return to it after decades of experience. The opening semitone slips gradually beyond the printed page and becomes part of everyday musical memory.

And somewhere along that path, the strange reversal occurs.

The little piece that its first editor did not regard as especially important becomes one of Beethoven’s best-known works. The manuscript that might have answered our questions disappears, while the melody written on it becomes almost impossible to lose.

The paper did not survive. The name remained a mystery. The first two notes, however, continued to travel.

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🎧 Listening Guide

  • The opening suspension: Listen to E–D-sharp before the tonic A settles. The music begins in a state of expectation rather than on a fully grounded tonic harmony.

  • The metric instability: Notice how the rapid opening notes seem to hover around the 3/8 pulse. The phrase needs to breathe without losing shape.

  • The arpeggio between the hands: Follow the accompaniment as it rises across the keyboard and passes from left hand to right. Melody and harmonic background form a single continuous motion.

  • The turn towards C major: Within the A section, the colour brightens briefly before the music gathers once more around E.

  • F major in the first episode: Hear the change in the broader phrases, greater mobility and rapid passagework that leads towards C major.

  • The return announced in advance: Before the complete theme comes back, the semitone attraction E–D-sharp has already recalled the opening.

  • The repeated A in the second episode: First hear the low note as a stable foundation beneath the chords, then notice when the bass begins its chromatic descent.

  • The silence and the arpeggio: After the dark chordal section, the music stops. From this pause, the ascending A-minor arpeggio begins pianissimo.

  • The final return: Compare it with the opening statement. The notes are almost the same, but after the two episodes the theme sounds more like return and memory than beginning.

🎶 Further Listening

These three approaches illuminate different sides of a work too often reduced to the familiarity of its opening phrase.

  • Ronald Brautigam – fortepiano: Particularly valuable because Brautigam has recorded both the established version and Barry Cooper’s reconstructed form of the 1822 revisions. Listening to them side by side makes clear how substantially Beethoven was still rethinking even so small a work.

  • Wilhelm Kempff: A restrained and lyrical reading, with natural phrasing and little sentimental excess. Of particular interest is the way the familiar theme retains simplicity without becoming flat.

  • Alfred Brendel: An interpretation that helps the piece emerge as a complete form rather than a famous opening page followed by less important material. The contrasts between the episodes and the returns of A take on clearer architectural meaning.

📚 Further Reading

  • Sieghard Brandenburg – Ludwig van Beethoven: Klavierstück a-Moll WoO 59. Für Elise
    A critical edition with facsimile of BH 116, transcription of the sketches and detailed commentary. A fundamental source for the genesis and textual history of the piece.

  • Joanna Cobb Biermann – Bagatelle in A minor WoO 59 (Für Elise), Henle Urtext
    A modern critical edition that re-examines the first edition, surviving drafts and disputed readings in the musical text.

  • Barry Cooper – “Beethoven’s Revisions to ‘Für Elise’”
    A study of the 1822 interventions and the problems involved in turning fragmentary revision material into a performable reconstruction.

  • Jürgen May – “Eine Bagatelle und andere Kleinigkeiten”
    Research into the provenance of the manuscripts from the estate of Therese Malfatti and the possibility that the famous dedication was added later.

  • Mina Yang – “Für Elise, circa 2000: Postmodern Readings of Beethoven in Popular Contexts”
    A study of the work’s extraordinary later dissemination and its movement from the classical repertoire into everyday and popular musical culture.

  • Richard Cohn – “Why We Don’t Teach Meter, and Why We Should”
    A study of metric perception that uses a characteristic passage from Für Elise to show how rhythmically complex apparently “easy” music can be.

🔗 Related Works

  • Ludwig van Beethoven – Eleven Bagatelles, Op. 119
    The collection with which the 1822 revision of Für Elise was associated. It shows how much musical thought Beethoven could compress into very small forms.

  • Franz Schubert – Moments musicaux, D 780
    Short piano pieces in which melodic intimacy, memory and sudden harmonic shadows acquire independent poetic force.

  • Felix Mendelssohn – Songs without Words, Op. 19b
    A different form of lyrical piano miniature, built on natural melodic flow and the impression of an unspoken song.

  • Robert Schumann – Kinderszenen, Op. 15
    Small pieces in which apparent simplicity becomes a field of memory, character and inward narrative.

  • Frédéric Chopin – Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4
    A short work in which repetition, chromatic descent and delayed harmonic resolution create expressive intensity far beyond the scale of the piece.

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🎼 Musical Reflection

Für Elise returns again and again to the same small theme, as though searching for something that music can recall with complete precision while history can no longer name it. Perhaps this contrast is one of the work’s strangest attractions: the melody remained, the name remained, but the story that connected them was lost.

Each return of E–D-sharp takes us to a place we recognise immediately. And yet, like a real memory, the return is never exactly the same—because the listener who comes back has already heard everything that happened in between.

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📖 Bibliography & Sources

Researching Für Elise requires a different method from analysing a work preserved in a definitive autograph. The musical form must be checked against the first edition, the surviving draft and modern critical editions, while the history of the piece depends on a chain of evidence in which two of the most important objects—the completed autograph and Nohl’s copy—have disappeared.

Manuscripts and editions

  • Beethoven, Ludwig van. First sketch of the theme, 1808. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus. ms. autogr. Beethoven Landsberg 10, p. 149.
  • Beethoven, Ludwig van. Sketches for Für Elise, WoO 59, spring 1810, with later revisions from 1822. Beethoven-Haus Bonn, BH 116.
  • Nohl, Ludwig, ed. Neue Briefe Beethovens. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1867, no. 33, pp. 28–33.
  • Beethoven, Ludwig van. Für Elise. Leichtes Clavierstück. Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1870.
  • Brandenburg, Sieghard, ed. Ludwig van Beethoven: Klavierstück a-Moll WoO 59. Für Elise. Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-Haus, 2002.
  • Cobb Biermann, Joanna, ed. Bagatelle in A minor WoO 59 (Für Elise). Munich: G. Henle Verlag, HN 1347, 2016.
  • Cooper, Barry, ed. Three Bagatelles. London: Novello, 1991.

Studies

  • Cohn, Richard. “Why We Don’t Teach Meter, and Why We Should.” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 29, 2015.
  • Cooper, Barry. “Beethoven’s Revisions to ‘Für Elise’.” The Musical Times 125, no. 1700, 1984, pp. 561–563.
  • Kopitz, Klaus Martin. “Beethoven’s ‘Elise’ Elisabeth Röckel: A Forgotten Love Story and a Famous Piano Piece.” The Musical Times 161, no. 1953, 2020, pp. 9–26.
  • May, Jürgen. “Eine Bagatelle und andere Kleinigkeiten: Zur Überlieferung von Beethovens WoO 59 im Kontext der Beethoveniana aus dem Besitz Therese von Drosdicks.” Bonner Beethoven-Studien 11, 2014, pp. 141–163.
  • Steblin, Rita. “Who Was Beethoven’s ‘Elise’? A New Solution to the Mystery.” The Musical Times 155, no. 1927, 2014, pp. 3–39.
  • Yang, Mina. “Für Elise, circa 2000: Postmodern Readings of Beethoven in Popular Contexts.” Popular Music and Society 29, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–15.

Digital resources

  • Beethoven-Haus Bonn — manuscript BH 116 and work catalogue.
  • G. Henle Verlag — Bagatelle in A minor WoO 59 (Für Elise), HN 1347: preface and critical comments.
  • Ludwig Nohl — Neue Briefe Beethovens, 1867: digitised copy of the first publication.