Clair de Lune Piano Visualizer
Debussy's Clair de Lune as falling notes on a glowing keyboard, played on a clean grand piano. Restyle it and export the video, or drop your own recording or MIDI file.
Clair de Lune at a glance
- Work
- Suite bergamasque, 3rd movement
- Composer
- Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
- Composed
- Begun around 1890, revised up to 1905
- Published
- 1905
- Key
- D♭ major
- Tempo
- Andante très expressif
- Difficulty
- Late intermediate to advanced
- The demo plays
- The opening, up to the flowing middle section, 94 s
What you see in the falling notes
The opening is slow and quiet: pairs of notes in thirds drift down in the treble, long notes that glow on the keys for several seconds, with very little in the bass. Towards the end the music swells into wide chords held with the pedal, reaching high into the treble, the fullest moment of the excerpt.
- 552notes
- 5.9notes per second on average
- 28notes in the busiest second
- 18notes sounding at once, at most
- D#1 to G#666 keys from the lowest note to the highest
- 18%of the notes below middle C, in the left-hand colour
Counted from the MIDI file of the demo excerpt (94 s). The sustain pedal goes down 40 times.
About Clair de Lune
Clair de Lune is the third of the four movements of the Suite bergamasque. Debussy began the suite around 1890 but only finished it in 1905, when it was published; how much of it was written in each year is unknown. Until then the piece carried a different title, "Promenade sentimentale".
Both the new title and the name of the suite come from Paul Verlaine's poem "Clair de lune" (1869), in which masked figures dance "bergamasques" in the moonlight. Clair de Lune means moonlight, and the music paints it with soft, floating chords rather than a dance.
MIDI of the demo: Bernd Krueger, piano-midi.de, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Videos made from it carry the same credit and licence (terms). How to make one: step by step.
Famous pieces in falling notes
Frequently Asked Questions
Moonlight. Debussy took the title from Paul Verlaine's poem "Clair de lune" (1869), which also gave the Suite bergamasque its name. Before 1905 the piece was called "Promenade sentimentale".
Late intermediate to advanced. The opening is slow, but it needs very even soft playing and careful pedalling; the flowing middle section, with arpeggios across the keyboard, is the harder part.
Yes. The composition is in the public domain, but the MIDI file of this demo is by Bernd Krueger (piano-midi.de) under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, so a video made from it has to credit him, for example "MIDI: Bernd Krueger, piano-midi.de, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE", and be shared under the same licence. With your own recording or MIDI file of the piece, only your rights to that file count.
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