When most people think of Turkish marches for piano, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s famous pieces first come to mind, perhaps followed by the concert arrangements of Beethoven’s Turkish theme by Rubinstein, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. Yet this subgenre extended far beyond these composers as the aesthetic tastes of the European continent evolved throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this video, I perform a curated selection of Turkish marches for piano that tell a story of how this genre changed over time, from Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca in 1783 to Alexander Krein’s March on a Turkish Theme published in 1941. I use a selection of historical instruments modeled by Pianoteq that roughly correlate to each date of publication.

While this list is not comprehensive—it is limited to original themes composed or transcribed for piano—I use each selection to represent a different manifestation of the Turkish march (and related pieces) as part of a Western musical genre. I consider it like a museum display, where many historical objects sharing a theme are lined up next to one another with contextual commentary. Individually, the pieces may be relatively uninteresting, but taken together, they become part of a meaningful historical narrative.

Below is a general list of these characteristics shared by many, though not all, of the pieces in this video. Composers also used many of these to depict vaguely “oriental” styles, but they often did so in the form of a march to signify that it was “Turkish.”

Common “Turkish March” Genre Markers:
Military rhythm in 2/4 or 4/4 time
Depictions of drum hits and rolls, cymbals, triangles and piccolos (Western equivalents to Turkish shawms)
Exotic ornamentation such as trills and semitone grace notes
Passages in rapid thirds and mordents/trills in thirds
Whole-and-a-half steps in melody (e.g. harmonic minor)
Often written in the key of A minor
Bass drone/pedal

00:00 1. Rondo Alla Turca (Mozart) - 1783
00:49 2. Turkish March theme (Beethoven) - 1809
01:25 3. Alla Turca, Op.8 (Berger, Ludwig) - 1814
02:17 4. Marche orientale, Op.8 (Dubois, Théodore) - 1867
03:44 5. Marche orientale, Op.28 (Goldner, Wilhelm) - 1868
04:59 6. Marche turque, Op.43 (Baille, Gabriel) - 1874
06:25 7. Ronde turque, Op.72 (Pfeiffer, Georges Jean) - 1880
07:22 8. “Turkish Entry,” No. 5 from Carnaval, Op.61 (Widor, Charles-Marie) - 1891
08:04 9. Turkish Fragments, Op.62 (Ippolitov-Ivanov, Mikhail) - 1931
09:33 10. Allegretto marziale, Op.46 No. 2 (Krein, Alexander) - 1941

Pianoteq instruments used:
1. Schmidt square piano (1780)
2. Weimes pianoforte (1808)
3. Besendorfer grand piano (1829)
4. Erard grand piano (1849)
5. Streicher grand piano (1852)
6–8. Bechstein grand piano (1899)
9–10. Erard grand piano (1922)

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