A few years ago I received the gift of a Rhythm Clocks musical wall clock. Every hour on the hour, it plays one of several short song excerpts. Somehow I identified one of the songs (possibly using SoundHound?) to be a popular waltz from an opera of Delibes.

I downloaded sheet music for it, edited by Ricardo Boppré. It turns out it was a slightly simplified version that had also been transposed from E flat major to C major. With a GoPro camera I recorded myself playing it for YouTube, here. This has reached 20K+ views, not so deservedly, but this shows the song itself is quite popular.

More recently, I found the “original” E flat version upon which Boppré’s version clearly had been based. I decided it isn’t much more difficult, so I didn’t feel the existence of the C major version was fully justified, and wished I’d recorded the original.

I typeset this version into the GNU LilyPond music formatting software. As with Le Chemin de Fer, I tried to make the output look just like the 1870 version, although I didn’t take it quite as far. Here is the LilyPond source file:

The MIDI file generated by LilyPond:

You can play the MIDI file in your browser using the tools from www.midijs.net, but I recommend downloading the MIDI file and playing it natively.

Play MIDI Stop MIDI

And the PDF file of the sheet music:

With LilyPond, it is near trivial to transpose a piece. In the source code, I have two lines setting the variable “transposeKey”. Simply uncommenting one line or the other selects which key. For grins, here is the C major version of the sheet music: