Guitar Pieces

An iconic piece of piano music! But how to play it on the classical guitar?

This page is my solution for the intermediate guitarist.

About the original

I won’t say too much about the original piece, because it’s so well known and so much has been written about it already — you probably wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know it already! But you can read more about it here.

One thing that makes this effort timely for me is that Beethoven titled it “Sonata Quasi Fantasia” — like a Fantasia — and I’ve also been working recently on arranging Fantasias written for lute a few generations earlier. By comparison, Beethoven’s piece is so much more orderly, measured, and consistent than its Baroque predecessors that the link is hard to see from this vantage point. However, Beethoven seems to have considered this piece (and its sister piece with the same title) as a departure from the well-established sonata form of his time, leaning toward a more improvisational and exploratory character.

Adapting from the piano

Adapting anything from piano to guitar involves a lot of big considerations, like…

• Pitch range. With 88 keys, the piano’s range is over seven octaves (though keyboards were not so large in Beethoven’s day). The guitar’s total range is only four-ish octaves on the fretboard (subject to tuning choices, and with compromises involved in using the highest part of that range), plus selected harmonic pitches. It’s often necessary to compress or switch octaves. In this piece the range is actually not too extensive, as long as we forego the low doubling of the bass notes in the left hand.
• Voices and texture. Keyboard players are used to playing all kinds of independent voices and chordal harmony, but what we can do on guitar is typically more limited. In this piece, we have a clear melody and a slow-moving bass with some inner accompaniment stuff going on, and that’s usually a pretty happy texture for the guitar.
• Dynamic range. The piano has a far wider dynamic range than the guitar, and can get very loud indeed! Beethoven’s original dynamic markings are almost all pianissimo with a few small crescendos and decrescendos, emphasizing that the player needs to hold back and remain at the most delicate end of that dynamic range. I left these original markings in place in my arrangement. However, when realizing this piece on the guitar, which is so much quieter and more delicate overall, I personally think the player can take a lot more liberty to get intense and put some oomph into the more intense sections without compromising the overall mood.

The dominant mood of this piece on piano is of course somber and dark, which is supported by the deep bass octaves and the long and powerful sustain offered by the piano’s enormous soundboard. The poor little guitar really can’t compete with this incredible resonance.

However, the guitar can offer the piece an extra level of intimacy and fragility, as well as some unique tone color and special effects like slides, vibrato, and harmonics. I want to make the most of this tradeoff without overdoing it. That’s what underlies my biggest change from the original: pulling the recurrence of the dotted melodic motive at the end out of the low, rumbly inner voice and playing it in harmonics instead. Although the effect is really different in terms of actual pitches, to me it is a better translation of the feeling I get from that melody’s recurrence: it’s sparser, more fragile, and more hauntingly lonely in the harmonics than it is to try to play it in the low notes of the guitar while crowding the bass in alongside it.

Some other principles I tried to follow when interpreting this piece:

• The bass, melody, and harmony are inviolable.
• Notes in the inner voice may be changed if necessary for fingering, such as to invert the chord, but this may not add new notes to the harmony.
• Keep all the notes played within each chord (usually each arpeggiated triplet) ringing whenever possible, rather than playing successive notes on the same string. I found that every time I cut off a note from ringing in this way, it stuck out noticeably as being empty and unsatisfying.
• The first note of the inner triplet voice may be omitted when there is also a bass note and/or a melody note happening at the same time, unless it is important for the clarity of the harmony or the voice leading (like in measures 8-9).
• I wanted to avoid playing extended passages up on the highest part of the fingerboard above the 12th fret, like during the long diminished chord arpeggio. The sound in this area is typically quite thin, and I feel that it doesn’t successfully carry the weight of the piece or of the mood. Instead, I chose to drop down an octave for that passage, even though this meant finding places to switch octaves both before and after.

Even with the simplifications, I still find it a challenge to play (though also a joy). It’s hard to sustain the mood all the way through to the end. But overall I’m happy with how the transcription turned out!

Other transcriptions

Of course, I’m by no means the first person who’s tried to play this piece successfully on guitar.

Francisco Tarrega, one of the great guitar players and composers of the 19th century, published an arrangement in D minor. I’m sure it sounded fabulous in his hands! But I found that I wasn’t able to get the feel I wanted from the part I wanted most to come out: that lovely flat-second-to-sharp-seventh part in measures 16 and 18. (If you want to try your own luck with Tarrega’s arrangement, Werner Guitar Editions helpfully offers an edition of it as a free download. Thanks, Brad!)

After mostly completing my own version, I located a copy of Agustin Barrios’ arrangement, which is also in A minor. I was chuffed to find that we solved some of the same problems in the same ways, and the places where we diverged were mostly intentional choices on my part to simplify, reduce difficulty, or otherwise diverge from the original. His version is like mine on hard mode 😅 — he maintains all the original inner notes on the first beats of the triplets and keeps all the voice leading and chord inversions exactly as written, even when it makes fingering very challenging. But I admit to lifting a couple of small ideas, too. Here’s a pretty great recording of it:

My guitar teacher, Tariq Harb, has also been working through an arrangement in the original key of C# minor. I tried out that key in the beginning, but I thought it was ultimately too uncomfortable compared to the benefits of switching to A minor — not least of which is getting to pedal on the low E string during the diminished chord section!

Surveying YouTube, you can find any number of other players trying their own versions, too.

What about the other movements?

The second movement should be relatively straightforward. It’ll probably sound a lot like something by Sor. It may be worth giving it a shot.

But the third movement is such a monster! Fast arpeggios covering more octaves than the guitar even has on the fretboard, and a super thick texture. That said, the part that alternates melody notes in the lower voice with the fifth scale degree above it would sound awesome on guitar in A minor, trading the melody against the open E string the same way Asturias does with the open B string… Tempting! Maybe there’s a way to work it as a duet for two guitars. 🧐

Download

You can download my arrangement here:

It contains notes and tablature in standard tuning.

Good luck! If you try it out, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.