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The Music at Tippet Rise
ABOUT THE PROGRAMBENJAMIN PESETSKY FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN (1810–1849)
Chopin completed the Preludes during the winter of 1838 and 1839, as he was staying in Majorca with his lover,
the writer George Sand, and her two children. If it sounds like an idyllic getaway, it was not: the Mediterranean island was shrouded in dreary winter weather, and Chopin fell
ill and was diagnosed with consumption. The locals feared contagion, and so he was forced to leave Palma to convalesce in an old Carthusian monastery. The Pleyel firm shipped him an upright piano to play there, which he used to finish the Preludes.
In her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, Sand offers her impression of the pieces:
Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are mel- ancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under the window, the faraway sound
of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. . . . Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart.
She also recounts a story about finding Chopin at work on the Prelude No. 2 in A Minor, the most haunting of the set. With a novelist’s touch, she writes:
There is one prelude that came to him through an evening of dismal rain—it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. . . . We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, “Ah, I was sure that you were dead.” . . . He confessed to me that while
Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28
There are 24 Preludes in Frédéric Chopin’s Op. 28: one in each key. They proceed by the circle of fifths, alternating major with relative minor. The order matches common harmonic practice, suggesting that Chopin intended them as a cycle, rather than an anthology of selections.
In some ways, the Preludes look back to earlier music: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier also covers all 24 keys and is an obvious touchstone (the Borromeo String Quartet plays selections on Saturday evening’s program). A forgotten set of 50 Preludes by Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870) has also been identified as a model for Chopin.
Chopin’s Preludes, however, were the first to liberate the prelude from its name, which suggests a strictly introduc- tory piece. Chopin uses the title instead to signify a short movement, usually based on a single idea, without complex development. To call them miniatures would be a bit too diminutive, to call them sketches would also seem mis- placed. Perhaps it was less a matter of re-contextualizing the traditional prelude, and more a matter of applying an old title to a new form.
The Preludes are not all built on a common pattern, however. Some are especially fragmentary: the quick flash
of No. 1, the gothic skulking of No. 2, the vanishing waltz of No. 7, the mournful tolling of No. 20 (later used as the subject of variations by Busoni and Rachmaninoff). Others are unusually extensive: the raucous No. 12, the twisty
No. 19, the conclusive No. 24. The rest are of average length, but still distinct in character: No. 3 and No. 5 are etudes; No. 4 and No. 6 are elegies; No. 14, a passing hailstorm; No. 15, a nocturne that lasts through the night, through
to the next morning’s awakening.