Free Flute Sheet Music

Tune of the Day: Overture from The Marriage of Figaro

Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata (The Marriage of Figaro, or the Day of Madness) is a four-act opera buffa (comic opera) composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais. Although the play by Beaumarchais was at first banned in Vienna because of its satire of the aristocracy, considered dangerous in the decade before the French Revolution, the opera became one of Mozart's most successful works.

The overture is especially famous and is often played as a concert piece. This effervescent number does not make use of any thematic material from the opera itself, but captures the essence of the work superbly. Mozart is said to have intended to insert a slow interlude, in the old Italian tradition, just before the recapitulation, and to have omitted it only because he hadn't time to write it down; he thus reunited the two parts of the Allegro, giving the piece a lively, genial character throughout.

Tune of the Day: Hardiman the Fiddler

The earliest appearance of this slip jig under the name “Hardy Man the Fiddler” is found in Francis O'Neill's Music of Ireland, published in Chicago in 1903. There are several tunes with the name “Hardiman” (of which “Hardiman the Fiddler” is probably the most famous). Collector David Taylor (1992) suggests that they honor the historian James Hardiman, author of Irish Minstrelsy (1831).

Similar slip jigs can be found in earlier manuscript copybooks, such as the one by Stephen Grier from County Leitrim, dating from around 1883.

Tune of the Day: Spanish Caprice

This is étude No. 16 from Ernesto Köhler's 25 Romantic Studies, Op. 66. It's in ABA'C form, with a common-time main theme in C minor, a central 3/4-time interlude in A-flat major and a 2/4-time fast coda in C major.

Tune of the Day: Duet in F-sharp minor by Köhler

Today's piece is duet No. 10 from the first volume of Ernesto Köhler's Twenty Easy Melodic Progressive Studies.

Tune of the Day: Adagio ma non tanto

Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonata in E minor for Flute and continuo, BWV 1034 is in the usual four-movement, slow-fast-slow-fast sonata da chiesa format. The first movement, marked “Adagio ma non tanto” (“Slowly, but not much”), is usually performed at a fairly deliberate pace despite the Composer's admonition.

Tune of the Day: Barrack Hill

This Dorian-mode jig is taken from Francis O'Neill's collection Dance Music of Ireland, published in Chicago in 1907. His source for the tune was accordion player Johnny O'Leary, from the Sliabh Luachra region of the Cork-Kerry border.

George Petrie (1855) had previously identified the melody as “a Munster jig”, and remarked that “it had a peculiar kind of dance”.

Tune of the Day: Study by Karg-Elert

This is the twentieth étude from Sigfried Karg-Elert's 30 Caprices: a “Gradus ad Parnassum” of the modern technique for flute solo.