The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Frédéric Chopin · twenty-four preludes for solo piano, Op. 28, one in each major and minor key, scored as one set in the published order · round the circle of fifths, each major key followed by its relative minor, from C major to D minor · finished in the winter of 1838 to 1839 on Majorca · about thirty-five to forty-two minutes complete, several of the preludes under a minute
Mode
Piano miniatures in a key cycle; étude, nocturne, mazurka, chorale, march, lament and toccata, each a prelude to nothing
Mythos
A journey through every key that does not return; the bell, the prayer and the funeral evoked by listeners more than built
Phase
Twenty-four pieces round the circle of fifths, major then relative minor; eleven marked slow or moderate, thirteen fast
Presentation
Concert music; for solo piano, published as one opus in 1839 and long played in selections before it was usually played whole
Register
From dread and exhaustion to a dance, a chorale and a storm; no word in the music but its tempo markings
Scale
One mind at the piano, in a winter; consciousness, mortality, the sacred and a dance of Poland, the family, labour, the state and history absent
Governing Proposition
Twenty-four pieces, one in each key, are set round the circle of fifths, and none of them introduces anything: each takes one figure and one state of mind and holds it to the end, some in under a minute. The wager of the set is that a state is complete at any length, and that a sequence of such states, bound by a key plan and a single manner and by no story, is one work. It begins in C major and ends in D minor, on three low notes, and it does not come home.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The set begins already in motion. No. 1, in C major, marked Agitato, is a single figure divided between the hands, and it is over in under a minute. It introduces nothing. A prelude, by the inheritance, was the piece before the piece: before a fugue, a suite, an improvisation. This one leads only to the next prelude, which leads to the next, and the set never reaches the piece the word promises.
The order is a plan of keys. Each major key is followed by its relative minor, C major by A minor, G major by E minor, and each major tonic stands a fifth above the last, so that the twenty-four go once round the circle of fifths: D major and B minor, A major and F sharp minor, on to F major and D minor. The plan was not new. Bach had written a prelude in every key in each book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, which Chopin is reported to have had with him on Majorca, and Hummel’s 24 Preludes, Op. 67, had already gone round this same circle.
What was new was what each station holds. Within the plan every prelude takes one figure and one state of mind and keeps them to the end, without development and without a second subject. The plan fixes the key; the law fixes the manner. Contrast of tempo and character is placed with care across the cycle, and eleven of the twenty-four are marked slow or moderate. But within the scheme a different prelude in the same key would sit as well, and the frame, borrowed, does less than a form that thinks.
Movement II
No. 2, in A minor, marked Lento, opens on a left hand of dissonant two-voice figures that grind against one another, and over them a slow melody that cannot find its key. A minor is not confirmed until the closing bars. For most of its length the piece is in no key a listener can name, and that is its subject: the knowledge that something is wrong before it can be said what. The withheld tonic is not an effect laid on the piece. It is the form, and it is dread.
No. 4, in E minor, marked Largo, is a melody of a few notes over left-hand chords that slide downward by semitones, one voice of the chord at a time. The melody barely moves; the harmony beneath it gives way, voice by voice, and the piece sinks. Exhaustion is disclosed as a harmonic fact. Charles Rosen gave both preludes pages in The Romantic Generation, and what the harmonies of No. 4 are, chord by chord, is still argued.
No. 6, in B minor, marked Lento assai, puts the melody in the left hand, under repeated chords in the right: the voice is low and the weight above it. These three, with No. 20 and the end of No. 24, are where the set holds mortality. They hold it as states, not as a story. The condition the set discloses, a self that is a sequence of complete moods with no narrative binding them, is the listener’s to assemble from twenty-four such pieces; the pieces disclose the moods, exactly.
Movement III
No. 7, in A major, marked Andantino, is a mazurka in two phrases of eight bars, and that is all of it. It is offered as a work. Chopin’s Poland enters the set here, for sixteen bars, as a dance rhythm. No. 9, in E major, marked Largo, is as short, and says its piece in a few broad lines. Lengthen either into a developed piece and what it knows, that a whole state is complete in its moment, is gone. Brevity is the instrument.
No. 20, in C minor, marked Largo, is chords only: three phrases, the last repeated softer. In a handful of bars it moves from grandeur to a whisper. The repetition is the one in the set that a subtractive test could take away, and it is the one that makes the piece a farewell. Listeners have heard a funeral in it, and in No. 4. The funeral is a use the world has found for the music, not a structure the music builds.
Schumann, reviewing the set on its publication in 1839, found the pieces sketches and beginnings, and found the composer’s mark on every one. The puzzlement was the stake. A set of pieces that stop rather than close, some of them a dozen bars long, risked being read as a notebook. For a century after, the set was played mostly in selections, Chopin himself playing groups of preludes in Paris, in 1841 among other years, and no one thought a handful a maimed work. Complete performance became usual in the twentieth century.
Movement IV
No. 15, in D flat major, marked Sostenuto, is one of the longest of the set. Through its outer sections an A flat repeats, under a calm melody. In the middle section, in C sharp minor, the same note is held as G sharp, and it becomes a tolling: the section swells to fortissimo, the repeated note at its centre. Then the D flat major melody returns over the same A flat. One note heard two ways, and one thought changing its meaning: the middle must swell for the return to mean anything.
The nickname “Raindrop” is not Chopin’s, and neither is the storm. The preludes were finished in the winter of 1838 to 1839 at the monastery of Valldemossa on Majorca, where Chopin stayed with George Sand, and the rain on the roof belongs to her memories and to the listeners, not to the score. Gide and Cortot, later, gave the preludes images and titles. The set did not ask for them, and the archetypes it is given, the rain, the bell, the prayer, are evoked from outside.
No. 17, in A flat major, marked Allegretto, is as long. Near its end low A flats sound beneath the melody, struck again and again, and they are what the piece was waiting for. No. 13, in F sharp major, is a nocturne; No. 21, in B flat major, marked Cantabile, a song. Between them the fast preludes show the making plainly: the melody of No. 8 threaded through demisemiquavers, the chromatic hand-crossing of No. 12 at Presto, the bass of No. 16 under an unbroken torrent, Presto con fuoco. Each solves one problem of the instrument, and leaves nothing over.
Movement V
The last three preludes are a disquiet, an unresolved seventh and a catastrophe. No. 22, in G minor, marked Molto agitato, is octave fury. No. 23, in F major, marked Moderato, is light figuration, and it ends with an E flat sounding against the F major chord: the set’s last major-key prelude closes on an added seventh that does not resolve. The last bright key of the cycle is left open.
No. 24, in D minor, marked Allegro appassionato, is a storm. The left hand spans two octaves in each figure, under a melody of rage, with runs that sweep the keyboard. It ends on three low Ds, struck fortissimo. The cycle that began in C major ends a tone higher, in the minor, and it does not return to its start. That is the one trajectory the set builds: a journey through every key that does not come home, ending in nothing but the floor of the instrument.
The set was published in 1839, in Paris by Catelin, dedicated to Camille Pleyel, and in Leipzig by Breitkopf and Härtel. It made the prelude a central genre of the piano: Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 11, Rachmaninoff’s preludes, Debussy’s two books, Shostakovich and Messiaen stand in its line. Cortot, Arrau, Argerich and Pollini are among the pianists who have answered it, and whether it is a cycle or a collection is still argued. Heard whole, as it now usually is, it remains what it was in 1839: twenty-four complete states of one mind, in every key, with no return.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside each prelude the subtractive test finds almost nothing. No. 7 is two phrases of eight bars and nothing else; No. 9 says its piece in a few lines; the last phrase of No. 20, repeated softer, is the one repetition that could go, and it is the one that makes the piece a farewell. The longer preludes hold their length: the middle of No. 15 must swell for the A flat’s return to mean anything. The cost is at the level of the unit. The key cycle requires twenty-four pieces, but a scheme requires a key, not this prelude: No. 3, No. 5 or No. 23 could give way to another figure in the same key. And for a century the set was played in handfuls.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What the set discloses, through sound and credited as fully as words: that a state of mind is complete at any length, and that the self is a sequence of such states with no story binding them. No. 2, its key hidden until the last bars, is the knowledge that something is wrong before it can be named. No. 4 makes exhaustion a harmonic fact, each voice of the chord giving way a semitone at a time. No. 24 is rage that ends in the floor of the instrument. These hold, and they can be stated. What holds the axis below its gate is that most of what is disclosed is mood, rendered with exactness, and the condition the set articulates is assembled by the listener from twenty-four moods, not built.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Height is reached often and in both registers. The sublime of dread: No. 2 over its grinding left hand; the middle of No. 15, where the repeated note becomes a tolling and the dynamics climb to fortissimo; the runs of No. 24 and its three low Ds; the octave fury of No. 22. The sublime of beauty: the lament of No. 4; the F sharp major nocturne of No. 13; the A flat return of No. 17; the cantabile of No. 21; and No. 20, whose chords move from grandeur to a whisper in a few bars. At least eight of the twenty-four rise. Held below the top by design: Nos. 3, 5, 10, 11, 14, 18 and 23 are brilliance, wit or play, beautiful and not elevated.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What is built is a journey through every key that does not come home: C major to D minor, with no return, ending on three low Ds. That trajectory bears some weight, since the last three preludes are a disquiet, an unresolved seventh and a catastrophe. The rest is evoked. The funeral heard in the chords of No. 20, the storm and the rain heard in No. 15, the bell and the prayer: these are given by listeners, and the storm is George Sand’s story, not the score’s. Gide and Cortot gave the preludes images and titles the set did not ask for. The key cycle is a system, not a myth, and this is the lowest of the twelve axes but one.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is the prelude as introduction, to a fugue, a suite or an improvisation, and the cycle through all the keys: Bach’s two books, and Hummel’s 24 Preludes, Op. 67, already in this circle-of-fifths order. The swerve is the prelude cut loose, introducing nothing and made a complete statement: the fragment as finished art, pieces that stop rather than close, pieces of a dozen bars offered as works, a set whose unity is a key plan and a manner rather than a form. The stake was real but bounded: Schumann found them sketches and beginnings, and the set risked being read as a notebook. Held by the path: Hummel had made the cycle, and the short improvised prelude was a living practice that Chopin turned.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses most of what it knows. Develop No. 4, No. 7 or No. 20 into longer pieces and the knowledge that a whole state is complete in its moment is gone: brevity is the instrument, not the container. The withheld tonic of No. 2 is form as dread; the melody of No. 6, in the left hand under repeated chords, is form as weight; the single repeated note of No. 15, heard as A flat and then as G sharp, is form as one thought changing its meaning. The key cycle makes a whole of fragments, each a key that will not come back. Held below the top because the cycle is a borrowed frame: within it, another prelude in the same key would sit as well.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, of nearly two centuries. Every major pianist has had to answer the set, complete or in selection, Cortot, Arrau, Argerich and Pollini among them, and tempo, pedalling and the question of the whole are still contested. The literature keeps returning: Schumann’s review on publication, Gide’s notes on Chopin, Charles Rosen’s pages on No. 2 and No. 4 in The Romantic Generation, Jeffrey Kallberg on the genre of the prelude. The questions stay open: whether the set is a cycle or a collection, whether No. 2 is in A minor at all before its end, what the harmonies of No. 4 are. Held a step below the deepest wells because Nos. 3, 5, 10 and 11 have been examined much less, and yield less.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is piano music and the concert music of the 1830s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a short piano piece could be and of what a set of them could hold: the autonomous prelude and the cycle of fragments, with the harmony of No. 2 and No. 4 far ahead of its decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the set made the prelude a central Romantic and modern genre, and the line runs through Alkan, Scriabin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 11, Rachmaninoff, Debussy’s two books, Busoni, Shostakovich and Messiaen, the line credited, not each link; and No. 4 and No. 20 passed into common musical life far beyond the piano.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the text was printed in 1839 and is settled, and nothing is lost or in doubt. The presence has been continuous for 187 years: the set stands among the most played piano works of any period, in the concert hall, the studio and the teaching room, and two of its preludes are in the popular ear. The cost is in the presence of the unit, which is narrower than that of its parts: for its first century the set lived mostly in selections, a delay in whole performance of the kind charged to other cycles. The surface fixed to its moment is small. Held a tenth below the widest figure for that.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the piano, and the making bears weight throughout. The figure of No. 1 divided between the hands; the voice-leading of No. 4, one voice of the chord moving at a time; the melody of No. 8 threaded through a right-hand figuration of demisemiquavers; the chromatic hand-crossing of No. 12 at Presto; the bass of No. 16 under an unbroken right-hand torrent; the wide leaps of No. 19; the left hand of No. 24 spanning two octaves in each figure under the melody; the single note of No. 15 carried through changing harmony. Each prelude solves one problem of the instrument without residue. A tenth below the Goldberg Variations, because the counterpoint of the whole is lighter and Nos. 3, 5 and 23 are elegant figuration.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: No. 7, a mazurka of sixteen bars in A major, and No. 24, a D minor storm ending in three low Ds; or the chorale of No. 20 and the toccata of No. 16. One law governs them: each prelude takes one figure and one state and holds it to the end, without development and without a second subject. The range it holds is wide: dance, chorale, nocturne, étude, march, recitative, lament. The key cycle is a second law, binding every piece to its place. The law is real, and it is a law of manner more than of material, easier to keep in short pieces than across forty minutes of developing music. Narrowness of unit is not coherence, and the axis stops there.
Score: 9.1 / 10
A form’s limits are recorded, not adjusted for, and this is the lowest of the twelve. The set holds consciousness, in twenty-four states of it; mortality, in No. 4, No. 6, No. 20 and the end of No. 24; the sacred, in the chorale of No. 20 and the processional middle of No. 15; the dance and the social, in the mazurka of No. 7, which brings Poland in for sixteen bars. Nature enters only through the listeners’ rain. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state and history do not appear, and the national is a dance rhythm, not an order held. The orders present are integrated by the key cycle and the one law, but they are few: one mind, at the piano, in a winter.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, then The Bottomless Well, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 9.1. Each prelude solves one problem of the piano without residue; nearly two centuries of pianists and scholars still contest the whole and its parts; the text is settled and the set is among the most played piano works of any period; and one law, a single figure and a single state held to the end, governs the mazurka and the storm alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: consciousness, mortality, the sacred and a dance of Poland are held by the key cycle and the one law, but the family, labour, the state and history are absent, and the form of the piano miniature holds few orders. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 and The Unconcealment at 8.1, which share a cause: the set builds one trajectory, a journey through the keys that does not return, and its rain, bell and funeral are evoked by listeners; it discloses moods with exactness, and the condition they make is assembled by the listener rather than built.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve clears it by a tenth at 8.6, but The Unconcealment at 8.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met at the line: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.5, and The Archetypal Deep stands exactly on it. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.6 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of the twenty-four Preludes, Op. 28, as published in 1839 in Paris by Catelin and in Leipzig by Breitkopf and Härtel, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand. The twenty-four preludes in the published order are scored as one set, one work; no prelude is scored separately, and no performance is the object. That the set has as often been played in selections as whole is evidence, weighed on The Inevitable, The Living Form and The Imperishable, and does not change the unit. The Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 45, and the posthumous prelude in A flat stand outside it. There are no words in the work but its tempo markings, and the work is not charged for that; the nickname “Raindrop” is not Chopin’s and is used only as a handle. Schumann’s review is given in paraphrase, not quoted. The key plan and the proportions of the set were counted by script; the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the year the preludes were begun, the dedication of the Leipzig edition, a London edition, the sum Pleyel is reported to have paid, the exact bar counts of single preludes, the number of the low A flats in No. 17, whether the low Ds of No. 24 were the lowest note of Chopin’s piano, the music played at his funeral, the date of Hummel’s set, the particulars of later variations on single preludes and of individual recordings, and the arguments in the literature for a shared melodic cell. The sound of Chopin’s own Pleyel against the modern piano bears on pedalling and is neither credited nor charged.