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.
Does this rating look right to you?
This rating is computed automatically from heterogeneous sources. It gets things wrong, sometimes badly. If you know this work, your answer is worth more than our computation: it tells us which ratings to review.
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 piece has a rather dry, contrapuntal character, with canonical figures that feel like a tight conversation between voices rather than expansive lyricism. You will primarily face demands in Sight-reading (Lecture à vue) (2.5/5), which here means anticipating staggered entries and repeated motifs at different pitch levels, and in Sustain pedal (Pédale de sustain) (2.5/5), where you must precisely manage pedal use to avoid blurring the imitative lines while preserving some resonance. The exact period is unknown, but the work sits in Bartók's piano solo output as an exploration of contrapuntal techniques rather than his folkloric pieces. I do not give a recommended reference recording because I am not sufficiently confident about a definitive interpretation for this specific work.