Schau, lieber Gott, wie meine Feind, BWV 153
Piano solo
In brief

The piece has a restrained, introspective character: steady bass gestures underpin melodic episodes that often resemble vocal recitative, producing quiet tension rather than overt flamboyance. You will need to work on Lecture clé de fa (2.5/5) to keep the left-hand voices clear — here that means accurately reading bass-line figures that span staves and coordinating independent left-hand fingers to sustain harmonic support — and on Baroque Ornaments (2.5/5), which require precise, small rapid executions (trills, mordents, appoggiaturas) integrated into the line without breaking the phrase. Originally this comes from Bach's body of sacred cantatas, and the piano arrangement should preserve the contrapuntal clarity and phrasing logic of the vocal model.

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Is this the right work?
MusicCoach difficulty
60/100
Intermediate
Likely range : 48–72/100
Confidence : 38% · to confirm
BeginnerIntermediateAdvancedVirtuoso
Exam grade
About grade 6 to 7

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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Relative difficulty
73%
Among Johann Sebastian Bach
73%
Era
Genre
Estimated skills
Theory
Knowledge of forms
1
Reading
Bass clef reading
1
Ornaments
Baroque ornaments
1
Technique
Three-or-more-voice polyphony
1
Style
Baroque style
1
Interpretation
Singing voice
1
What to play next?

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