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Baroque piano pieces

Keyboard music from about 1600 to 1750, the years of Bach, Handel, Scarlatti and Rameau, written for the harpsichord, the clavichord and the organ: the piano was invented around 1700, and few of these composers wrote for it. Here are 60 pieces by 12 composers, easiest first. Each has easier versions made from the score itself (the right-hand melody alone, then with left-hand roots), so you can start a step down and play it as written later.

Pieces
60
Levels
2 to 6
Key signatures
4 flats to 6 sharps
Length
9 to 230 bars

Reading Baroque music

Two hands of equal weight. The left hand is often a second tune rather than chords: read it as a line, mostly moving by step against the right hand, and practise each hand alone first.
Pieces here: Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114 (Petzold, level 3); Invention No. 1 in C, BWV 772 (Johann Sebastian Bach, level 3).

Ornaments: trills, mordents and turns printed as small signs over a note, which the player fills in. Learn the notes plain, then add the ornaments once the hands are sure.
Pieces here: Minuet in F, BWV Anh. 113 (anonymous, level 3); Menuet, from the Premier livre (Rameau, level 3); Courante (Jacquet de La Guerre, level 4).

Dances: the gavotte, hornpipe, sarabande and gigue, each with its own metre and step. Most fall into two halves, each played twice.
Pieces here: Gavotte (Telemann, level 2); Hornpipe in G minor (Purcell, level 3); Sarabande, HWV 437 (Handel, level 3); Gigue (Jacquet de La Guerre, level 4).

Few marks for loudness or speed. The harpsichord couldn't play louder by touch, and players chose speed and loudness for themselves; where a score here prints them, they are mostly an editor's.

What the scores print

Of each period's pieces in the library, the share whose score prints each kind of sign. Ornament signs fade after the Baroque, as composers wrote out what they wanted, and marks for loudness, pedal and speed grow through the Romantic period.

Baroque
1600–1750		Classical
1750–1820		Romantic
1820–1900		Early 20th century
1900–1945
Ornament signs (trill, mordent, turn)48%26%7%0%
Loud and soft (p, f, crescendo)20%60%78%67%
Pedal marks3%6%27%7%
Slowing and back (rit., a tempo)3%4%32%13%

Level 2

A tune over a simple left hand, mostly in one hand position.

Level 3

Both hands busy, the hand moves around, a sharp or flat or two.

Level 4

Real independence between the hands and more accidentals.

Level 5

The edge of early intermediate: dense textures, fast passages and far keys.

Level 6

Intermediate: the notes of level 5 at concert speed, held even from the first bar to the last.

Composers

Each composer is placed in one period, by when they were writing; one whose working life spans two is placed where most histories place them.

Arne lived until 1778, but wrote Rule, Britannia! in 1740, in Handel's London, and is placed with the late Baroque.

Praetorius wrote at the turn from the Renaissance and is placed with the Baroque's first years.

Hymns, carols, popular songs, ragtime, teaching studies and traditional tunes aren't music of a period in this sense, so their composers aren't placed in one, and a hymn tune by a composer placed here is left out too. They have pages of their own: hymns, Christmas music, ragtime, studies and traditional tunes.

Other periods: Classical period piano pieces (1750–1820) · Romantic piano pieces (1820–1900) · Early 20th-century piano pieces (1900–1945)

Open a piece to print any of its versions free, or to play it at your MIDI keyboard with every note marked. New to reading? The level 2 sight-reading exercises are a good warm-up.