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Frédéric Chopin’s Twenty-Four Preludes, Op. 28 appeared in 1838–1839, at the same time as such monumental works as the Second Sonata, ballades, scherzos and études. The composer concluded the cycle of preludes on Majorca, where he had taken Bach’s two-volume Well-Tempered Clavier, which he had known from his childhood years. Chopin responded to Bach’s grandiose idea – to compose a series of preludes and fugues in all extant major and minor tonalities – in terms that were the exact opposite. His works include preludes, very short ones, such as the Prelude in A Major (No 7) which lasts just sixteen bars. And if Bach arranged his preludes and fugues across the chromatic scale, Chopin arranged his preludes according to the circle of fifths, underlining the relationship between the neighbouring tonalities as much as possible. This means that the twenty-four preludes should preferably be performed together and not individually.
The cycle of twenty-four preludes forms a condensed encyclopaedia of Chopin’s style. Here there are brilliant examples of cantilena (for example, Preludes No 4 in E Minor, No 6 in B Minor, No 15 in D Flat Major), there is a piece close to Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, a chorale and even a funeral march. Almost half are dazzling virtuoso pieces in which the extremely complex piano figurations do not destroy the lightness and elegance inherent in miniature works.
The barcarolle is a song of the gondoliers in Venice in the characteristically rocking rhythm that conveys the movement of a boat on the waves of the lagoon. This genre was extremely popular with the Romantic composers, and it took off in Russian music, starting with Glinka. Chopin turned to the easily recognisable rhythm of the barcarole several times, in particular in his Second Ballade. But he wrote only one work with this word in the title.
Barcarole, Op. 60, was written in 1845–1846 and became one of the composer’s last major works alongside his Polonaise-Fantaisie and his Cello Sonata. It would be natural to expect something in the vein of nostalgic recollections of the distant past from this late work, the more so as it is in the rarely met tonality of F Sharp Major (which was normally used to embody ephemeral visions), but Chopin, quite the reverse, wrote very full-blooded music. The left hand plays the rocking rhythm and the right the songful melody, doubled now into third, now into sixth, and in terms of the volume of ornamentation in the Barcarolle Chopin cedes nothing to Liszt’s virtuoso works. Following several nostalgic moments in the central section of the reprise, the true apotheosis of the Barcarolle comes – it sounds triumphant in a way it had never done with any other composer.
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Sonata No 3 was one of Chopin’s last works. It was written in the summer of 1844, when the composer had been seriously affected by the death of his father in Poland and was comforted only by the arrival of his beloved sister Ludowika.
The Sonata in B Minor is remarkable for its symphonic scale and, at the same time, its severity of style. There are no remaining traces of Chopin’s previously much adored salon genres, and the romantic fantaisie is confined in a classical framework. It is an incredibly noble and aristocratic work with a powerful march as the main theme in the first section, the beautiful secondary theme inspired by Italian bel canto. The second section is an impetuous fantaisie scherzo while the third is a lofty largo, which opens with a pathétique introduction. The central sections, the Scherzo and the Largo, are imbued with nostalgic tones. The sonata’s finale is a tarantella that rises to grandiose proportions.
Anna Bulycheva
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