24 Préludes Opus 28

If there was no precedent for the ballade which Chopin brought into music, there was at least a titular model for the Preludes and Nocturnes upon which he lavished some of his most sublime poetry. A worshiper of Bach, Chopin returned again and again to the bountiful inspiration of the Master's Well-Tempered Clavier. Its Preludes were of a perfection of content and design neither he nor anyone else could presume to emulate. For what they were, they sufficed for all time. All one might do was to adopt the title as a form of homage and then proceed to run through all the major and minor keys, as Bach had done twice over in the inimitable forty-eight Preludes and Fugues. Here, then, a century later, were twenty-four Preludes by an avowed votary of Bach, with a title and sequence to acknowledge a debt and something all his own, and altogether new, to say. What is that something? Perhaps the word ..prelude" supplies the best clue of all. Preludes are prefatory statements to something that is left untold, to be surmised or imagined the clue rather than the event. They are like sketches in a painter's portfolio, with the difference that they depict everything the composer intends to depict. At times they prod the mind like startling memoranda. Some are brief stabs of lightning illuminating an unexpected scene. We are alerted for still greater wonders when, abruptly, there is a pause, and a new something, in a new key, announces a new Prelude.The German pianist Ludwig Ehlert called them .,shooting stars". The American critic James Huneker said they were ..Chopin's pearls". In range, vision, passion and depth Huneker believed they alone would have put Chopin among the immortals...If all Chopin, all music, were to be destroyed", he confessed, I would plead for the Preludes". To realize that one would then have to live without Bach and Beethoven makes one doubly awed by such rapture. Both Huneker and Anton Rubinstein admitted a predilection for the titanic eruption of power that is the B flat minor Prelude, No. 16. It made Huneker think of an imperious eagle on a great rock-symbolic of Chopin's proud, lone splendor. Schumann also envisioned eagles in the Preludes, or, at any rate, ..eagle feathers and ruins". The phrase appears in a highly complimentary context. Was it not Schumann who early proclaimed to the world: ..Hats off, gentlemen! A genius!" The Preludes confirmed Schumann's conviction that Chopin was..the boldest, the proudest, poet-soul of his time". It takes a poet to recognize a poet. It will be realized that the Preludes, heard as a unit, have little in common except their composer and the artist who at the moment in his spokesman. Other than their compactness, brevity and abruptness, they have no single characteristic to link them. They are almost mystic bursts of light catching random insights into larger actualities. It is as if the music dare not or cannot see more. Yet the Preludes both satisfy and incite the imagination to go beyond. Each is like a picture that equals thousands of words and hints at more. There are lyrical episodes and dramatic ones, profoundly tragic admissions and beguiling vignettes infused with a quick breath of spring. There are sudden spins of wild headlong energy and fragments of a funeral march that probe deep into the cosmic heart of grief. It was the fourth Prelude, in E minor, with its valorous anguish, that made the most appropriate music at Chopin's funeral at the Madeleine in 1849, four brief turbulent decades after his birth in Poland. Huneker once said that with this Prelude alone Chopin had earned the name of Poet forever. Speaking of poets, it was the Prelude in G major, No. 3, that brought out the bard in that level-headed American pedagogue Ernest Hutcheson: ..It takes fairy fingers to compass the sun-kissed ripples of the left hand". The Preludes cover the widest imaginable emotional spectrum the spectrum of Chopin's very being from tumult to whimsy, from glimpses of hell to the smallest and sweatest of songs. If the preludes are, in a sense, all starts and no finishes, what was Chopin's own life but a succession of prefaces to dramas that once begun never quite went anywhere, except the final drama of disease and early death? Produced by R.C. Apex BLP 7915 Cover design by Cora ME. van Duyn Recording engineer Dick Klomp 1979 printed Manufactured by Dureco Weesp / Holland Printed by Dnj, vid. Steeg. Enschede/Holland Litho by Litho Twente int. b.v. Enschede/Holland