Für Elise

A bagatelle is a small piece written for its own sake, and this is one: cataloged as WoO 59, dated to around 1810, and never published while Beethoven was alive. It was printed for the first time in 1867, forty years after his death, from a manuscript that has since gone missing. So there is no autograph left to check the printed notes against, and editions still disagree about details of a piece almost everyone can hum.

Nobody knows who Elise was. The candidate argued for most often is Therese Malfatti, a pupil Beethoven is thought to have proposed to around the time the piece was written, on the theory that the editor misread a name in Beethoven's handwriting, which was famously hard to read. Other names have been put forward since, and the case reopens every couple of decades. None of it amounts to an answer.

Nobody argues about the opening. The shimmer of E and D sharp rocking back and forth, four notes before the phrase has really started, may be the most recognized handful of notes ever written for a keyboard. It is why the piece lives on every piano bench in the world.

On a mandolin that shimmer is one finger and one open string. The E is the open E course and the D sharp sits a semitone under it at the sixth fret of the A course, so the pair rocks back and forth without the hand moving at all. The arpeggios the left hand borrows from the piano's right, C E A and E G sharp B, sit under the same hand in first position. The farthest reach on the site comes in the echo bar near the end: a high E at the twelfth fret of the E course, higher than anything on any other page here, one note, up and straight back down. Everything else sits where a beginner's hand already is.