Noctave
The piece
This eighteenth-century French song opens with a request: the singer asks "mon ami Pierrot" to lend his pen to write a note. In 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville captured a few lines of it with his phonautograph, a device that traced sound onto blackened paper but could not play it back. Made audible in 2008, that trace is among the earliest known recordings of a human voice. Here the melody moves to the left hand.
The left hand sings between the low G and E, almost always in the five-finger position set on C. Because the thumb sits at the top, the fingering is the mirror of the right hand's: C takes finger 5, D finger 4, E finger 3. The first two phrases are identical. The third repeats D, then steps down to the low G, so the hand has to open downward before returning for the reprise of the opening. In the right hand, G, F, E and D last two or four beats; let them ring without striking them again.