The Turkish March

Turkish March

A Turkish march or marcia alla turca is a march written by a classical composer in the so-called Turkish style that includes particular rhythmic patterns and often features piccolos, cymbals, bass drums and triangles....

(Marcia alla turca) is a well-known classical march

March (music)

A march, as a musical genre, is a piece of music with a strong regular rhythm which in origin was expressly written for marching to and most frequently performed by a military band. In mood, marches range from the moving death march in Wagner's Götterdämmerung to the brisk military marches of John...

 theme by Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...

. It was written in the Turkish style

Turkish music (style)

"Turkish music", in the sense described here, is not music of Turkey, but rather a musical style called Alla turca that was occasionally used by European composers of the 17th and 18th centuries...

 popular in music of the time.

The theme was first used in Beethoven's "6 Variations on an Original Theme", Op. 76, of 1809. In 1811 Beethoven wrote an overture

Overture

Overture in music is the term originally applied to the instrumental introduction to an opera...

 and incidental music

Incidental music

Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, film or some other form not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as the "film score" or "soundtrack"....

 to a play by August von Kotzebue

August von Kotzebue

August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue was a German dramatist.One of Kotzebue's books was burned during the Wartburg festival in 1817. He was murdered in 1819 by Karl Ludwig Sand, a militant member of the Burschenschaften...

 called The Ruins of Athens

The Ruins of Athens

The Ruins of Athens , Opus 113, is a set of incidental music written in 1811 by Ludwig van Beethoven. The music was written to accompany the play of the same name by August von Kotzebue, for the dedication of a new theatre at Pest....

(Op. 113), which premiered in Pest

Budapest

Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...

 in 1812. The Turkish March appears as item No. 4 of the incidental music. Many music lovers associate the theme with The Ruins of Athens, although that was not its original appearance.

The march is in B flat major, tempo vivace

Vivace

Vivace is Italian for "lively" and "vivid". It is pronounced in the International Phonetic Alphabet.Vivace is used as an Italian musical term indicating a movement that is in a lively mood ....

 and 2/4 time. Its dynamic scheme is highly suggestive of a procession passing by, starting out pianissimo

Pianissimo

Pianissimo is an Italian word, meaning "very soft". It can mean:*Pianissimo, refers to the volume of a soft sound or soft note.*Pianissimo Peche, a brand of Japanese cigarettes made by Japan Tobacco....

, poco a poco

Poco a Poco

Poco a Poco is a single by Adicta, released in 2001.-Personnel:*Toto - vocals*Rudie Martínez - synthesizers, programming*Fabio Rey - guitar*Leo García - backing vocals...

 rising to a fortissimo climax and then receding back to pianissimo by the coda.

Derivative works

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...

 wrote a piano transcription in 1846, "Capriccio alla turca sur des motifs de Beethoven" (S. 388).

Anton Rubinstein

Anton Rubinstein

Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein was a Russian-Jewish pianist, composer and conductor. As a pianist he was regarded as a rival of Franz Liszt, and he ranks amongst the great keyboard virtuosos...

 arranged a popular piano version
of the march in B flat major, tempo Allegretto. Sergei Rachmaninoff

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...

further arranged Rubinstein's version, heard on piano roll (1928).