Free Sheet Music, Intermediate Cellists, Romantic Period
First published on May 17, 2026 by Seb
Last updated on May 17, 2026 by Seb
They DOGED my Piano;
– the recomposer
But I Can Still Brahms With Four Strings.
Brahms Piano Intermezzo in A major Op. 118 No. 2 is recognized worldwide as “the” piano intermezzo. This recomposer has long imagined performing the work as a self-accompanied cello solo. As usual, the music has been transposed to suit the cello’s natural resonance and range, first to G major, then shifting to C major.
Brahms often seemed to glide past bar lines, allowing phrases to lean their weight onto unexpected parts of the measure. The pacing and pulse shift constantly, as though the composer regarded time signatures as suggestions more than laws. Taking a cue from Brahms himself, the recomposer likewise treated meter as a necessary inconvenience. This self-accompanied cello intermezzo emerged organically, at times echoing Brahmsian melodies, but more often unfolding and transforming according to its own internal logic.
As usual, this recomposer asks to be forgiven for his amateurish rendering of this piece. He invites real cellists to record this music as replacements for makeshift recordings currently shown below.
Find below sheet music, with annotations by the recomposer on his own approach to playing this piece as an amateur cellist himself. Notes are slurred with suggested bowings. The recomposer also marked fingering positions suitable for an intermediate cellist. But you can, and probably should make your own annotations. Clean sheets with just notes are found further down this post. Following are PNG and PDF versions with annotations.
If you are an advanced cellists, you will want to figure out your own slurrings, bowings and fingerings. Find below clean sheets with only notes. Feel free to further revise this recomposition. Both PNG and PDF versions are available.
If you plan to improve on this music, start with Musescore files which you can further edit in the free Musescore app. But since you can’t download most Musescore files on the commercial Musescore’s website unless you are a paid user, we store .mscz files on this site whenever we can, so you can freely download them here. They are saved here as .zip files because WordPress does not accept .mscz files. Just download them and unzip:
This recomposition itself is made available for all to play under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
You may also consult IMSLP’s excellent discourse on how Creative Commons licenses apply to work of music and derivative work such as recordings of a composition. In short, you can freely use, share, perform and record this work, so long as you credit the composer, and continue to share you derivative work under the same CC BY-SA license, even if you do it for profit.
ps: Credit for the name Intercello goes to Luis Cobo.
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