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Updated: May 7, 2025
The real anguish of his heart is not expressed in the nocturnes but in the preludes and études, strange as these names may seem for such pathetic effusions of his heart. The étude, opus 10, No. 6, seems as if it were in a sort of double minor; as much sadder than ordinary minor, as ordinary minor is sadder than major. Chopin had abundant cause to be melancholy.
No. 17, another developed piece, strikes one as akin to Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. I must not omit to mention No. 21, one of the finest of the collection, with its calming cantilena and palpitating quaver figure. Besides the set of twenty-four preludes, Op. 28, Chopin published a single one, Op. 45, which appeared in December, 1841.
"Several of these Preludes," writes Madame Sand, "represent the visions that haunted him of deceased monks, the sounds of funeral chants; others are soft and melancholy; these came to him in his hours of sunshine and health, at the sound of the children's laughter beneath the window, the distant thrum of guitars and the songs of the birds under the damp foliage; at the sight of the pale little roses in bloom among the snow."
"The existing collection of the Hymns is of unknown editorship, unknown date, and unknown purpose," says Baumeister. Why any man should have collected the little preludes of five or six lines in length, and of purely conventional character, while he did not copy out the longer poems to which they probably served as preludes, is a mystery.
But if we read the fantastic dreams of Disraeli, the intellectual dandyisms of Bulwer, remembering the after careers of which these were the preludes, we can understand how there might well be something in those earlier efforts which would betray itself in the way of thought and in the style of the young men who read them during the plastic period of their minds and characters.
"Then there were sighs, the deeper for suppression, And stolen glances, sweeter for the theft, And burning blushes, though for no transgression, Tremblings when met, and restlessness when left. All these are little preludes to possession, Of which young passion cannot be bereft, And merely tend to show how greatly love is Embarrassed, at first starting, with a novice."
He was, however, not averse to occasionally taking a hint from him when it would serve his purpose. It is the prerogative of genius to take its material wherever it can be found. "Plato," said Emerson, "plays sad havoc with our originalities." Beethoven's influence is plainly discernible in the preludes and overtures of the Wagner dramas, which are symphonic throughout.
Certainly this setting bears very little resemblance to the actual; but just as certainly its artistic fitness to the tale of terror which it preludes gives it an imaginative verisimilitude. "You might have known it was Sunday if you had only waked up in the farmyard.
Notwithstanding such later creations as the fourth "Ballade," Op. 52, the "Barcarolle," Op. 60, and the "Polonaise," Op. 53, it can hardly be said that the composer surpassed in his subsequent works those which he had published in recent years, works among which were the first three ballades, the preludes, and a number of stirring polonaises and charming nocturnes, mazurkas, and other pieces.
At the windows of the houses, on the quay of the city, and along the walls, the thoughtful and genuine people of Paris watched with a sorrowful air and in mournful silence these preludes of disorder; while the various bodies of merchants, dressed in black and preceded by their provosts, walked slowly and courageously through the populace toward the Palais de justice, where the parliament was to assemble, to make complaint of these terrible nocturnal scenes.
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