Some thoughts on the Chopin Preludes during Stage II of the 2025 International Chopin Piano Competition, Warsaw

 

Lake and Temple at Arkadia

In Stage II of the Chopin Piano Competition we listened to many interpretative examples of the 

Chopin Preludes 

For this reason before you read the reviews:

Some thoughts on the Chopin Preludes

Improvisation or 'préluder' before embarking on an extensive work in the same key was well established among composer-pianists of the day but has been largely abandoned except by those few knowledgeable performers on the period piano. 

Chopin was a master of ambiguity and luring the listener into false expectations. He often performed the Preludes as separate pieces or in groups possibly arranged in pairs. One reads in his 1842 Parisian recital: 'Nocturnes, Préludes and Etudes'. In those days there was far less academic attention to Urtext numeric detail than today. "Movement by Mozart' might vaguely appear in a programme.

Some of the briefer Préludes do not finish with a full harmonic close which causes the listener to expect further elaboration or another work to follow on. Others such as No. 15 in D major 'The Raindrop' or the existentially blighted, fearsome No.28 in D minor (featured in the 1945 film adaption of Oscar Wilde starring Angela Lansbury and played by Lela Simone). These are clearly to be considered performance works in their entirety. 

The Préludes seem now well established by structuralists, pianists and Bach scholars as a complete and symmetrical work, a masterpiece of integrated yet unrelated ‘fragments’ (in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century sense of that aesthetic term). 

James Huneker approved of Arthur Friedheim playing them as a cycle in New York in 1900. James Methuen-Campbell attributes the popularization of all twenty-four to performances by Busoni and Cortot. One scholar has even demonstrated a perfect key design symmetry between the 24 major and minor keys of Preludes and Fugues that make up Bach's Well Tempered Clavier and Chopin's Préludes. As is well known, Chopin adored Bach and practiced the WTC as preparation for recitals of his own work. He took an edition of the ‘48’ to Mallorca where he completed the Preludes.

To my mind, each Prélude can of course stand on its own as a perfect miniature landscape and world of emotional feeling and tonal climate. Although it is now well established  as a complete work, a masterpiece of integrated ‘fragments’ or 'ruins' (in the nineteenth century picturesque garden sense of that aesthetic term). 

‘Why Préludes? Préludes to what?’ as Andre Gide asked rather gratuitously. I think it unnecessary and superfluous to actually answer this question. One possible explanation is the the practice of préluding. This was an improvisational activity of preparation set in the same key, immediately before a large keyboard work was to be performed. The activity was well established in Chopin’s day but has been abandoned in modern times. We must turn to Chopin’s love of Bach to at least partially understand them. 

The Préludes surely extend the prescient Chopin remark ‘I indicate, it’s up to the listener to complete the picture’.  

Their 'Prélude egos' should retain an intimacy of meaning and communication which waxes and wanes fleetingly and poetically until that final passionate utterance in D minor of No. 24, traditionally the 'key of death'. The last three notes (the lowest D on Chopin's piano), were executed by some performers with their fist. This gesture for me visually gave expression to those lines by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in his poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, lines which could apply to the spirit of the cycle as a whole:

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Miyu Shindo refrained from this manner of conclusion. 

Some renowned performers of the cycle (Sokolov, Argerich, the greatest historically to my mind by Alfred Cortot) give one the impression of an integrated 'philosophy' or spiritual narrative which I occasionally felt was present there. 

The Preludes were written in a period of great emotional upheaval for Chopin. I have always felt a Pleyel in the right hands is the perfect instrument for a poetic and mystical rather than virtuosic interpretation of the Préludes. After all he had a Pleyel pianino sent to Valldemossa. Performance on a Pleyel pianino is not a popular contemporary manner of rendering them in today's cavernous concert halls.... 

Chopin's Piano: A Journey thorough Romanticism by Paul Kildea (Allen Lane, 2018) is a fascinating historical study of his pianos on Majorca and the evolution of the Préludes.

Such comparisons with great musical artists are desperately unfair and invidious to level at any young pianist with such a precocious talent and glowing pianistic future ahead. However, profound Musical depth grows organically with maturity. This is inevitable as life stretches ahead and the tigers of experience begin their work ... as we all know...

More thoughts on the Chopin Preludes

My studies in European nineteenth century historical architecture and painting have prompted alternative connections and additionally a quite different or possibly additional interpretation and genesis of the Chopin Preludes which has little to do with music. These thoughts are written in the spirit of the E. M. Forster incentive to 'Only connect'.

The evolution or rather invention of the Ballade musical form by Chopin was inspired (not imitated or copied as a programme) by the extended literary form of the Ballade written by great poets such as Adam Mickiewicz.  Perhaps this form of brief Chopin Prelude was similarly stimulated or at least strengthened by a cultural philosophy not necessarily connected with music.

The second volume of the 17th century French architect Augustin-Charles D'Aviler's Cours d'architecture (1691) is arguably the earliest dictionaries of architectural terms. The notion or concept of the word 'fragment' is as follows:  

        '...this word means any part of architecture or sculpture found among the

ruins, such as a piece of a base, a capital, a cornice, a torso or a limb of a

figure, an ancient base-relief, etc. which may also be seen in the pastiches in

buildings by the Italians, and in the exhibit rooms of the antiquarians.'

[Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. D. Rowland 

(Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1. 1 and 1. 2.]

D'Aviler informs us that an architectural fragment could be a decorative piece or a collectible object. This meaning of the word fragment as something found and incomplete had not changed much since the seventeenth-century. The specific use of the word 'fragment' in music can be considered as an analogy to its conventional meaning as a residue, remains of a work of art or an artifact, a piece of a text, a poem or in this case the fragment as a piece of music. At all events, it is something which no longer exists in its entirety or which is not represented in its totality. A fascination with partial but inspirational fragments provided by ruins, often although not necessarily from ancient Rome or Greece, had taken over the European cultural, painterly and landscape garden imagination in the nineteenth century.

Many antique fragments of anachronic character were incorporated during the construction of landscape gardens into picturesque 'temples', the 'ruins' of castles, follies, bridges, grottos or simply displayed in the picturesque gardens. The gardens at say Puławy or Arkadia in Poland and Stourhead or the Rousham of William Kent in England, illustrate this philosophy. These buildings scattered in the gardens  were constructed not for practical purposes but in the image of an ideal historical and painterly context. Picturesque journeys to the ruins and classical texts on architecture helped to create romantic concepts independent of the locality and time and detached from the geography and history.

Interestingly, in 1825 at the age of 15, Chopin was on holiday at Szafarnia and received a letter from his friend Jan Matuszyński in Toruń. His friend mentioned a brick he had seen that had been taken from, what was believed at the time to be, the birthplace in Toruń of the astronomical genius Copernicus (born 19th February 1472). Chopin has also seen this brick and it was mentioned at the time in his bantering correspondence with Matuszyński.

In a grand ceremony in 1810, the brick had been transferred to Puławy and placed in the outside wall of the so-called Gothic House created by Princess Izabela Czartoryska in her gardens. In the Temple of Sybil there, she had also assembled a collection of irreplaceable fragments or historical 'souvenirs'.

Embedded in the thematically named outside walls of the Gothic House at Puławy (El Cid, Rome, Casimir the Great, Kościuszko and so on) were bricks from sundry castles and churches, pieces of marble and stone from famous buildings, fragments of antique Roman or Etruscan ruins, marble sculptures and bas reliefs (Polish eagles carved in stone), Napoleonic iron cannon balls, fragments of historical buildings all in a fascinating lapidarium. Remnants of this philosophy of fragments, the assemblage of 'souvenirs', can still be seen in the Princess's garden of Arkadia despite looting and destruction through invasion and war.

'Ruins' of a Roman aqueduct in Arkadia

Chopin had managed with diplomatic license to travel to Toruń in 1825 and saw this brick and reacted to its remarkable significance as an historic fragment. Being from a highly educated family, he was aware of the imaginative significance of fragments. The Preludes could essentially be considered as brief musical 'fragments'. Of course Chopin was older when composing these remarkable works  Valldemossa. Quite naturally, most thoughts around their genesis have centered around music which often does not make complete sense (see André Gide). I feel the word 'Prelude' could additionally be defined in view of a prescient observation Chopin once made concerning his own brief compositions in Paris:

 ‘I indicate, it is up to the listener to complete the picture’ 

I feel one could regard the Preludes as brief musical fragments which catalyze an imaginative musical flight on the part of the listener in the same way as an architectural fragment stimulated popular flights of historical fancy in the mind's eye in the nineteenth century. For example, the gardens at Stourhead in England with its temples, obelisks, eye-catchers and grottoes were designed around a circumlocution following Virgil's Aeneid. The visitor wanders these follies in company with Virgil with his great poem as an inspired historical guide.

I feel the Chopin Preludes  may be considered fragments of an idealized musical image, a motif of brief reference to a musical work that is created by mere suggestion but in the mind of the listener without its original content. Each would remain, as they are, complete worlds or universe of imaginative reference or inspiration, on its own.  

After all, Chopin in his rare recitals often performed only two or three disconnected Preludes (which would give time to the listener to briefly imagine a possible extended musical work or context). This would be without the unacceptable (at that time) concept of a 'cycle' of Preludes as one composition, as we conceive of the Preludes almost ubiquitously. This would fit the contemporary nineteenth century cultural philosophy Chopin composed in admirably. 

Just an intellectual emotion I experienced listening to so many Chopin Preludes during every Stage II performance in the competition ...