For over a century countless piano students have had occasion to encounter this charming trifle. Anatol Konstantinovich Lyadov (sometimes spelled Liadov or Liadoff) was at his best writing short pieces because he was notoriously lazy and undisciplined. He rarely kept at a large-scale composition for the length of time needed to finish and polish it. However, he was a talented and imaginative composer, capable of producing beautiful sound pictures, and left several brief pieces such as this one.

From the late eighteenth century, snuffboxes were highly popular among upper-class Europeans. We often read, for instance, that Mozart was given a snuffbox by this or that member of royalty or nobility after performing or writing a composition for them, and perhaps wonder what he did with all of them. (The answer is that such gifts were usually stuffed with gold coins and were designed to preserve the polite fictions that the high-born individual was not descending to the level of commerce by actually paying for something and that the composer was not a hired servant. In addition, the snuffboxes were often made of gold and silver and could readily be sold for additional cash with no offense taken.) Many snuffboxes had musical mechanisms inside; these were expensive and highly popular in Mozart's time among the wealthy. It is likely that Lyadov had such an ornate and charming bauble in mind when he wrote this piano piece for his son Mikhail in 1893.

The piano imitates the sound of a music box by limiting itself to the relatively small range of notes that would be contained in such a device, placed in the high register of the piano to give the music a tinkly sound. The piece is in the form of a delicate little waltz, not too slow, and marked in the score "Automaticamente" ("Automatically"). Its lightness seems to suggest a rococo scene, although the waltz itself is not authentic to that era in music.

In 1897, Lyadov outdid himself in charm by creating an orchestrated version of the piece. It uses only the flutes and clarinets of the orchestra, plus glockenspiel and harp, preserving the special delicacy and lightness of this two-minute marvel.

© Joseph Stevenson, Rovi