No.39 — Staccato and Legato
Piano solo ~2 min
In brief

The piece has a bright, contrasting character, alternating bouncy, percussive passages with more singing lines that require clear articulation without losing the musical line. You will face technical challenges especially in Scales and arpeggios (4.4/5) — here you must keep steady fingering and coordinated hands to preserve harmonic clarity — and in Staccato (4.4/5), which calls for a controlled wrist release and precise finger rebound to produce short, clean attacks. The exact period is not specified in the provided information, and the work is listed as a piano solo with no detailed placement in the composer’s catalogue given here. I do not give a reference interpretation because I cannot confidently identify a widely recognized recording for this specific work.

MusicCoach difficulty
22/100
Beginner
Likely range : 16–28/100
Confidence : 57% · fair confidence
BeginnerIntermediateAdvancedVirtuoso
Exam grade
About grade 2

Estimated from our difficulty score, not taken from an exam syllabus. Checked against 333 works on the ABRSM syllabus: the exact grade is right 7 times out of 10, and within one grade 99 times out of 100.

Difficulty estimate by MusicCoach on a scale of 1 to 100.

Where this work sits
050100

Most works cluster between 45 and 65: a small score gap often marks a real step. The highlighted bar shows this work among those for the same instrument.

The MusicCoach difficulty measures a work's overall demands (technique, reading, stamina) on a shared 0-100 scale, consolidated from editorial and pedagogical reference points (Henle, exam syllabuses, curation) and our own analyses. It measures neither musical value nor the practice time YOU will need: two musicians of the same level can experience the same work very differently depending on their strengths (hands used to octaves, quick sight-reading…). The confidence reflects how many reference points sit behind the score and how well they agree — a lightly documented score is flagged “to validate”. For a truly personal bearing, the diagnostic and your space compare each work to YOUR estimated level, which the score alone cannot do.

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Difficulty sources
Combined exam syllabi
Grade 2
20/100 normalised
Relative difficulty
20%
Among Béla Bartók
10%
Era
Genre
Estimated skills
Technique
Scales and arpeggios
1
Technique
Legato
2
Technique
Staccato
2
Technique
General technique
1
What to play next?

Each suggestion combines difficulty gap, risk, confidence and skill overlap. The first two cards in each column are the most useful pedagogically.

See the whole progression