La Campanella

ComposerF. Liszt
Notes4,064
Length4:21
Peak density28.0 notes per second, ranked 3 of 315
Average15.6 notes per second
Tempo100 bpm
Difficultytier 5 of 5, bigger chords and rapid shifting
In Klavieropaid
Piano roll of La Campanella: all 4,064 notes plotted over 4:21, right hand in cyan and left hand in magenta.
The actual chart. Time runs left to right across 4:21, pitch bottom to top, right hand cyan and left hand magenta.

You need a MIDI keyboard and Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Opera on a desktop or laptop. Not Safari, not iPad, because Apple does not support Web MIDI. Full requirements.

Third densest in the library, and famous for something else entirely

La Campanella is 4,064 notes over 4:21, peaking at 28.0 notes per second. Only Un Sospiro at 31.4 and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 at 29.6 are denser, and all three are Liszt.

So the reputation is earned. But it is earned for the wrong reason, and this is the clearest place in the library to say so plainly: what makes La Campanella famous is the jumps, and note density cannot see a jump.

The piece is named for a bell, and the bell is a single repeated high note that the right hand has to hit accurately while leaping more than an octave to reach it, again and again, at speed. Our measure counts how many notes arrive per second. It does not count how far your hand travelled to get to each one. On this piece, the distance is the difficulty.

What the chart does show

Look at the piano roll and the leaps are visible even though the number cannot express them: the cyan right-hand notes sit in two separated bands, a melody in the middle and a thin line of repeated notes far above it, with nothing between. That gap is the hand travelling. A piece of comparable density with the notes packed into one band, like Flight of the Bumblebee, is a genuinely different physical problem.

This is why we publish the measure with its limits attached. It is one axis, honestly labelled, and La Campanella is the piece that proves one axis is not enough.

Playing it here

Take the right hand alone first, in Practice mode, while Klaviero plays the left. The leaps are the whole job and there is no point rehearsing them against a moving target. Rhythm mode judges every note PERFECT to MISS, and a missed bell note breaks the combo like any other.

If this one lands

Un Sospiro, Liszt4,144 notes · 4:08 · peak 31.4 n/s
Transcendental Étude No. 5, Liszt4,441 notes · 3:16 · peak 25.9 n/s
Winter Wind, Chopin3,172 notes · 3:07 · peak 20.6 n/s
Play La Campanella All 315 pieces