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.
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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Each suggestion combines difficulty gap, risk, confidence and skill overlap. The first two cards in each column are the most useful pedagogically.
The safest next step.
A genuine step up, without a jolt.
A useful leap with guided practice.
This Polonaise in D presents itself as a dance that is both lively and somewhat dramatic, with marked accents and rhythmic replies that require keeping the forward motion without hardening the line; it should sound dance-like yet taut. Technically you will face chiefly issues of Phrasing (2.5/5) and Legato (2.5/5): the phrasing here requires shaping short melodic cells and linking them with slightly varied attacks to suggest the small breaths of the dance, and the legato demands sliding the fingers in the accompaniment to join voices without losing the rhythmic pulse. The piece belongs to Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's keyboard output and reflects the meeting point between baroque inheritance and gestures pointing toward early classicism, even though the precise dating of this work remains uncertain.