Bortkiewicz: Marionettes Op. 54 No. 3 "The Spanish Lady"

About the piece.

Marionettes Op. 54 is a set of nine easy piano pieces, first published by N. Simrock in Leipzig in 1938. Each piece is a portrait of a puppet: a Russian peasant girl, a Cossack, a Spanish lady, a Tyrolean, a gypsy, a marquise, a Chinese man, a teddy bear, and at the end Punch himself. No. 3, “Spanierin”, is the Spanish lady. It is in E minor and lasts around two minutes.

Bortkiewicz wrote for young pianists throughout his career. Marionettes follows Aus meiner Kindheit Op. 14, Der kleine Wanderer Op. 21, the Andersen fairy tales Op. 30 and Kindheit Op. 39, and it was not his first Spanish piece for children either: Der kleine Wanderer already has a serenade called “Spanien”. The pieces are short character sketches, one to two minutes each, written to be played and learned from.

The set comes from a hard time in his life. He had been back in Vienna since 1935, was in serious financial difficulty, and in the same year as Marionettes he published his German translation of the letters between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck to earn some income.

Marionettes is still in print at Simrock as “Nine easy piano pieces”, and it has been recorded complete by Klaas Trapman and Jouni Somero. For a pianist who wants to get to know Bortkiewicz without the technical weight of the etudes and preludes, it is the easiest way in.

Learn it at your own speed.

This tutorial was made with LumaKeys, a Mac app for learning piano from falling notes. Open a MIDI file of the piece, or transcribe a piano recording you have, then slow it down, loop the hard bars and practise one hand at a time. The download is free.