Free Sheet Music, Intermediate Cellists, Romantic Period
First published on Feb 25, 2024 by Seb
Last updated on May 4, 2024 by Seb
The arranger relayed this origin for the piece you find here:
I tried to play The Swan, but it was too hard for me. It’s a never-ending stream of high position notes, played on just the A and D string. So I transposed it down a fifth to accommodate my low skill level. But then no self-respecting pianist would play the traditional piano part with me. So I added some accompaniments of my own, in between notes from the melody, in the style of Bach cello suites. Yeah. I quite like the end result – an unaccompanied Swan.
– the arranger
Here is an mp3 synthesized by MuseScore. The above video and the mp3 will be replaced as soon as a capable musician steps forward to give us a good rendition.
The “Bach Wrote What?!” project is partially inspired by this rearranged, weirdo music for unaccompanied solo cello. It may sound jarring to the traditionalist, that presumably Bach would have written The Swan this way… because the end result most definitely doesn’t sound Bach. But don’t forget that Saint-Saëns composed “The Carnival of the Animals” more than a hundred years after Bach – the musical style had moved on by then.
If this benign rearrangement offends you, just you wait until we feature “Bach Wrote Jolyne” and “Bach Wrote Tecumseh Valley”.
Find below sheet music with notes and suggested slurs. Feel free to re-slur notes for your own favorite phrasing. Or further revise this rearrangement. Both PNG and PDF versions are available.
The PDF may also be downloaded from the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) at Bach Wrote The Swan (Hsu, Fred).
By transposing the original down a fifth, the arrangement allows notes from the original melody to be played on three strings (A, D & G), rather than just two (A & D). It also changes the key from G major to C major. This allows cello’s C-string to better add to the overall harmony.
The first part of the melody was changed from 3/4 to 4/4, to allow the Bach-style self accompaniment to sound like Prelude in G major from Suite 1. Then multi-voice self-accompaniment were added in between notes from the melody line.
If you are curious about how the arranger approached this piece as a poorly-skilled cellist himself, check out the annotated sheets below. More advanced cellists will want to figure out their own bowings and fingerings.
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:
Copyrights for Bach’s music and Saint-Saëns music have long expired. The re-arrangement 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.
Updated 2024-03-14: there is a “Double Solos” version now. Go to: Swan + Swan by Bach. Find a synthesized mp3 as well as a video recording below.