Chopin: Preludes

Product Information

Azoury, Pierre (1999). Chopin through His Contemporaries. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-30971-7.

Zank, Stephen (2005). Maurice Ravel: A Guide to Research. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-8153-1618-3. Taruskin, Richard (1996). Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-816250-6. The funeral doom metal band Pantheist used part of Prelude No. 20 in "Envy Us," from their album O Solitude. Latham, Alison (2011). "Rubato". Oxford Companion to Music online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-957903-7 . Retrieved 27 March 2021. The intro and outro to The Moody Blues' early single "Love and Beauty", composed and sung by original member Mike Pinder, features this piano passage.This piece is played in the opening scene of the second season of The 100, when Clarke is being held in quarantine in Mount Weather. Witt, Michał; Marchwica, Wojciech; Dobosz, Tadeusz (2018). "Disease not genetic but infectious: multiple tuberculomas and fibrinous pericarditis as symptoms pathognomonic for tuberculosis of Frederic Chopin" (PDF). Journal of Applied Genetics. 59 (4): 471–473. doi: 10.1007/s13353-018-0456-3. PMID 30047032. S2CID 51718815. Improvisation stands at the centre of Chopin's creative processes. However, this does not imply impulsive rambling: Nicholas Temperley writes that "improvisation is designed for an audience, and its starting-point is that audience's expectations, which include the current conventions of musical form". [171] The works for piano and orchestra, including the two concertos, are held by Temperley to be "merely vehicles for brilliant piano playing... formally longwinded and extremely conservative". [172] After the piano concertos (which are both early, dating from 1830), Chopin made no attempts at large-scale multi-movement forms, save for his late sonatas for piano and cello; "instead he achieved near-perfection in pieces of simple general design but subtle and complex cell-structure". [173] Rosen suggests that an important aspect of Chopin's individuality is his flexible handling of the four-bar phrase as a structural unit. [174]

Some, though not all, of Op.28 was written during Chopin and George Sand's stay at a monastery in Valldemossa, Mallorca in 1838. [2] In her Histoire de ma vie, or "Story of My Life", Sand related how one evening she and her son Maurice, returning from Palma in a terrible rainstorm, found a distraught Chopin who exclaimed, "Ah! I knew well that you were dead." While playing his piano he had a dream: Letters from Chopin to Woyciechowski in the period 1829–30 (when Chopin was about twenty) contain apparent homoerotic references to dreams and to offered embraces.

Preludes. Mazurkas Nos 41 & 47

This piece is featured in The West Wing episode " Han" and is used as the embodiment of Han, for which "There is no literal English translation. It's a state of mind. Of soul, really. A sadness. A sadness so deep no tears will come. And yet still there's hope." Liszt, Franz; Cook, M. Walker (1 April 1877). "Life of Chopin". The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular. 18 (410): 184. doi: 10.2307/3351980. ISSN 0958-8434. JSTOR 3351980.

From 1824 until 1828 Chopin spent his vacations away from Warsaw, at a number of locations. [n 6] In 1824 and 1825, at Szafarnia, he was a guest of Dominik Dziewanowski, the father of a schoolmate. Here, for the first time, he encountered Polish rural folk music. [24] His letters home from Szafarnia (to which he gave the title "The Szafarnia Courier"), written in a very modern and lively Polish, amused his family with their spoofing of the Warsaw newspapers and demonstrated the youngster's literary gift. [25] Chopin himself never played more than four of the preludes at any single public performance. [5] Nor was this the practice for the 25 years after his death. The first pianist to program the complete set in a recital was probably Anna Yesipova for a concert in 1876. [8] Nowadays, the complete set of Op. 28 preludes has become repertory fare, and many concert pianists have recorded the entire set, beginning with Ferruccio Busoni in 1915, when making piano rolls for the Duo-Art label. Alfred Cortot was the next pianist to record the complete preludes in 1926. Jones, J. Barrie (1998a). "Piano music for concert hall and salon c. 1830–1900". In Rowland (1998), pp.151–175.The music for the Commodore 64 version of the videogame Ghosts 'n Goblins by Mark Cooksey is based on Prelude No. 20.