Piano Music in C major

The character of C major

Bright, plain, and rhetorical. The native key of the keyboard. Bach uses it for his First Prelude in the Well-Tempered Clavier; Beethoven for the heroic Waldstein Sonata.

For pianists, key choice is never accidental. Each tonality on the keyboard has its own physical fingerprint — the pattern of black and white keys under the hand, the resonance of open strings, the historical associations attached to it through three centuries of repertoire. Studying multiple works in C major alongside one another reveals how successive composers understood the key's possibilities, and how the conventions of each era shaped what a single tonality could be made to express.

The pieces below are sortable, downloadable as PDF scores, and free to perform, study, record, and re-engrave. Every entry links to the original IMSLP page, where you can compare editions, read editorial notes, and access alternative arrangements where they exist.