53: The Alberti Bass in Sonata 16

Now is a great time to discuss a particular accompanimental texture emblematic of the Baroque and Classical era: the Alberti bass. There is, perhaps, no more famous Alberti bass in the popular conscience than the one in the first four bars of the Sonata Facile—a sonata explicitly written to be easy for students, which is undoubtedly one of the first things a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kid taking their first piano lessons will learn. If you don’t recognize it by that name, or by K545, its catalog number, try looking at the score and singing the treble line; once you hear it, I’m sure you’ll recognize it. (I, for one, heard this sonata for the first time that I can remember, at my maternal grandparents’ house when I was quite young, while watching the movie “Frankie and Hazel”, in a scene during which Frankie is dancing ballet, and her teacher accompanies her on the piano with this sonata.)


Let’s look at what happens in these four bars. First, in the right hand, bar 1 is all about outlining the 1 chord and establishing “home”. Having a sense of “home” is important for anyone, but especially for the students for whom this was explicitly written. Bar 2 in the right hand is, effectively, B-C, strongly suggesting some kind of authentic cadence—perhaps a PAC (spoiler alert, no, instead, an inverted IAC)? Bar 3 is split half and half between an A and (a G and a C), implying motion to somewhere else (F? A minor? D minor?) and a return home (which, really, rules out D minor in the first half). The fourth bar is, effectively (take out the trill) G-F-E, strongly suggesting either I6/4-IV-I or the even more powerful I6/4-V7-I (which ends up being correct).

How can I be so sure of which path to take in these harmonic forks in the road? By looking at the content of the bassline (in the left hand, which in this case is high enough to be notated in treble clef, lest we have an illegible number of ledger lines above the staff all over the place, totally not conducive to a student), I can immediately determine the harmonic structure of the phrase.

This harmonic framework is laid out through the Alberti bass, a 1-5-3-5 pattern that truly was everywhere in the keyboard music of the Baroque and Classical periods. The analysis is remarkably easy once you notice the pattern.


·       Bar 1: C-G-E-G is 1-5-3-5, so we’re in C

·       First half of bar 2: he inverts the chord, so we have 5-1-7-1, so the G7 is in second inversion

·       Second half of bar 2: identical to bar 1—CGEG is 1-5-3-5, so we’re back in C

·       First half of bar 3: again, an inverted chord, this time F—don’t get distracted by the fact that we’re in C and have a C at the bottom here; this is F-A-C getting inverted—so the pattern is 5-3-1-3

·       Second half of bar 3: identical to bar 1

·       First half of bar 4: again, we have an inversion— of the V7 (in this case, V6/5) this time—so the pattern is 3-1-5-1

·       Second half of bar 4: identical to bar 1, returning us to C major

The sonata was written like this because, if you’re a beginning student, you need very clear harmonic changes in logical places: at the bar, or every 2 beats—never 3+1 or 1+3, or funny business changing harmonies on an unaccented part of a beat. And the Alberti bass was used for two reasons: 1) because it’s so common, so it’s great to get the hand used to it as early as possible, since it’s so common, basic, and important, and 2) the reason the Alberti bass exists at all—because a “simpler” 1-3-5-3-type left hand, while of course legal, would not be nearly as interesting. The motion inside a group of an Alberti figure, because of how chords are constructed in the first place and how it handles them, necessarily is not all in thirds, drawing the ear more attentively to the motion of the left hand and the harmonies it plays, and more effectively engaging the listener.

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