Frédéric Chopin (1810 – 1849): 24 Preludes op 28
One of history’s unlikelier couples, Frédéric Chopin and George Sand were living proof that sometimes opposites really do attract. While he was reserved, sensitive, sickly, his personality somewhat shaped by old aristocratic codes, she was rebellious, ebullient, hedonistic and something of an iconoclast. What they did have in common was a shared celebrity – while Chopin’s music was played all over Europe by the mid-1830s, Sand was briefly the world’s most widely read novelist.
Despite being regarded as something of a sex symbol in 1830s Paris, Frédéric Chopin had not enjoyed much luck on the romantic front before meeting Sand. This was partly down to his own nature – he was never the gregarious type to have a beautiful countess on his arm every time he went to a party, unlike some of his more flamboyant piano-playing rivals. His natural shyness and formal manners could make him appear unreachable to many of his most ardent female fans.
He had only come close to marriage once, when in 1836 he became engaged to the daughter of a wealthy Polish expat family then living in Germany, Maria Wodzińska. But after a somewhat protracted and torturous courtship, the engagement was finally broken off by Maria’s overbearing family, who felt that a mere musician (even one as great as Chopin) and moreover one not evidently in the best of health, was beneath their daughter’s notice. At the end of the whole unconsummated affair, Chopin took all his letters from Maria and sealed them in an envelope marked “my sorrow”, keeping it in a personal desk-drawer for the rest of his life.
In a more philosophical moment he might have thought to himself, better luck next time. But if Chopin had a certain type of woman in mind for that next time, it was certainly not Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil – or as she was better known by her pen name, George Sand. After first meeting the famous novelist at a party in 1836, he was flatly unimpressed. “What an unattractive person la Sand is,” he complained to a friend. “Is she really a woman? I am ready to doubt it.” To his family he wrote that there was “something about her that repels me.”
Sand was then thirty-two years old and coming out of a particularly productive and passionate period of her life. Having divorced her first (and only) husband Casimir Dudevant in 1831, she had since written her first dozen novels and dated many of the great and good of Paris (mainly writers and actors, not all of them men) in a spirit of “romantic rebellion”. In a repressive, post-Napoleonic era, when French women were once more being reduced to ornaments and bystanders, Sand boldly cut through the sexist narrative, attracting mild scandal for her loud advocacy of female emancipation, passion and even (briefly) free love. She derided marriage, defended female divorcees, made a point of dressing in men’s clothes (without bothering to obtain the required license to do so) and smoked large, expensive cigars. Most scandalously of all, her novels sold better than any of those of her male contemporaries.
She was also a woman used to getting what she wanted. Having been present at several of Chopin’s intimate soirées in the mid-1830s, she soon found herself, like so many before her, smitten with the frail but exquisitely turned-out young virtuoso. Unlike so many before her, she was determined not to take no for an answer from the composer. Long before Chopin had even noticed her, she considered her options, as she wrote to a friend:
Until now I have always been faithful to those I have loved… [but] I was rather disturbed at the effect Chopin had on me. I still have not got over my amazement, and if I were very proud I would feel humiliated at allowing my heart to fall straight into infidelity just when my life seemed calm and settled forever… but if heaven would have us remain faithful to earthly affections, why does it sometimes allow angels to lose their way among us and meet us in our path?
Sand did not even entertain the possibility that Chopin might not return her feelings. After an initial strategy of turning up to his gatherings in slightly more feminine attire (less frightening to the composer’s tastes), she finally slipped him a note one evening that simply read “I adore you” (to which one of Sand’s actresses friends had appended “and me, too!”), Chopin gradually found himself warming to the attentions of the unusual but sassy novelist, even if he continued to play hard to get for just a little longer.
By the summer of 1838 they had become lovers, although to begin with their affair was carried out with some discretion. Chopin did not tell his family or even some of his friends about his new liaison, while Sand tried in vain to let down her incumbent lover, the novelist Félicien Mallefille, as gently as she could. He did not however take the news well, especially when he discovered the identity of his replacement. Having previously written words or praise for Chopin, his subsequent harassment of Sand and her new flame quickly reached alarming levels. He took to hanging about outside Chopin’s apartment and once chased Sand down the street when she left there late one night. Sometimes he would bang on Chopin’s door and threaten to beat him up (thankfully Chopin at this time had a burly flatmate, the Polish financier Wojciech Grzymała, who was able to answer the door and dispose of the combative novelist).
It was not an auspicious start to their relationship, while Sand also noticed, with growing concern, Chopin’s worsening cough. Finally, she suggested that they should go south for the winter – not only would a warmer climate benefit Chopin’s health, but they could also escape all the tension and gossip-mongering in Paris for a while. It was an excellent idea in theory.
The venue Sand eventually chose was the island of Majorca – a popular enough holiday destination today, but somewhat off the beaten track in 1838 and a little more challenging to get to. Another issue was that the island belonged to Spain, and Spain was currently in the midst of an unpleasant civil war, and they would have to travel through Spain just to get to the island. But Sand didn’t care to be dissuaded whenever she set her mind to something, and so later that autumn she duly set off on her grand adventure with Chopin, along with two of her children from her marriage to Dudevant, Maurice and Solange.
All went well to begin with, until they were delayed at Barcelona – then under martial law and regularly subject to anti-monarchist guerilla attacks, filling the air with gunfire and explosions. When they finally crossed the Mediterranean to Palma, they almost immediately attracted suspicion among the conservative-minded islanders, for their being apparently unmarried and, even worse, not devout church-goers. The ongoing war on the mainland only worsened things, as Sand complained: “the prudence of the Spaniard and the distrust of the islander reach such limits that a foreigner must not ask anybody a question of the very slightest importance, unless he or she wishes to run the risk of being taken for a political agent.”
Although restricted in their choice of landlords willing to offer them accommodation, they eventually found a villa – only lacking glazed windows – on the edge of Palma. With the last vestiges of summer still hanging in the air, they were initially blessed with warm, sunny weather. Just briefly, they believed they had arrived in Paradise. According to Sand, the beautiful wild scenery “seems to be presented with a kind of euphoria for the delight of the eye.” Chopin himself wrote cheerily:
Here I am at Palma, surrounded by palms, cedars, cactuses, olives, oranges, lemons, aloes, figs, pomegranates, etc everything that the Jardin des Plantes has in its hothouses. The sky is like turquoise, the sea like lapis lazuli, the mountains like emeralds, the air as in heaven. During the daytime it is sunny and hot, and everyone walks about in summer clothes; at night you hear guitars and singing for hours on end. There are huge balconies overhung with vines; the ramparts date back to the Arabs. Everything, including the town, has an African look. In a word, life is marvelous!
But the sunny weather proved to be an anomaly. Within a fortnight, cold, wet conditions descended on the island and then barely let up for the rest of the winter. Chopin was of course no novice to such a climate, but their primitive, window-less accommodation offered no respite against the damp air, and attempts to heat the rooms with braziers only resulted in a lot of smoke and little heat – all of which was disastrous for Chopin’s lungs.
Soon he was alarmingly ill, running a fever, spitting up blood and unable to sleep. Various physicians were called out, as Chopin reported with a certain gallows humour: “I have been as sick as a dog these past two weeks [and] three doctors have examined me… The first said that I was going to die, the second that I was about to die, and the third that I was dead already.”
But the Majorcan doctors weren’t so far off the mark when they became the first of Chopin’s physicians to recognize he was suffering from serious, full-blown tuberculosis. The diagnosis would however have one immediate and disastrous consequence. As Majorcan law made it mandatory to report new cases of tuberculosis, Chopin and Sand were soon after thrown out of their villa, while Chopin’s bed was burned, the walls white-washed and the furniture destroyed – all of which then had to be paid for by Sand. In all, the travelers had become about as popular in Palma as the plague, with shopkeepers refusing to serve them, while Sands’ children had stones thrown at them in the street.
At this point, not least given the perilous state of Chopin’s health, they really should have returned to France. But Sand hated to admit defeat, and after a desperate search she finally found them alternative – albeit highly unusual – accommodation in an abandoned Carthusian monastery, half-way up a mountain about 17 kilometres from Palma.
With the monastery’s regular occupants having recently been turned out by the Spanish government, for having supposedly become too wealthy and too influential a presence in the region, some of the cells and outhouses in the complex had become available to rent. Chopin and Sand took three interconnected rooms (at least with pane-glass windows this time), although they were spartan and often draughty (Chopin likened his to a tall, upright coffin). They slept on camp beds and made do with the most basic of furniture.
The views from the monastery were stunning, but the rain continued to fall, the wind blew down the mountainside, and sometimes a thick mist descended and shrouded everything in white. Chopin’s health ebbed and flowed. His moods were up and down, as he told a friend that they were “in a strange place, beyond the sea and rocks”. And yet in other letters his appreciation of their surroundings would swell to something like delight.
Of the two of them, Sand bore the physical privations somewhat better, often taking long walks around the damp, surrounding countryside, while at night, she and her children took to exploring the rest of the dark monastery, revelling in its Gothic majesty. Chopin, by contrast, found their surroundings ghoulish and terrifying after sunset, and Sand recalled returning one night to find Chopin working at his piano in a state of abject horror, “his eyes struck with dread, and his hair standing on end.” Some of this inevitably found its way into his music. He would play through his latest work-in-progress, with what Sand would describe as the “terrible and heart-rending obsessions which had stolen over him in that hour of loneliness, sorrow and fright.” On one particularly stormy evening, after Sand had spent the day in Palma, she got back to find Chopin looking particularly haggard at the piano, having convinced himself that something bad had happened to her. “His composition that evening was full of raindrops resonating on the tiles of the monastery.”
But even as Chopin suffered in his unfamiliar and uncomfortable surroundings, he was on an extraordinary wave of creativity. Initially he had had to make do on the island with an old upright piano. But one of his beloved Pleyels had been ordered from Paris, and miraculously it one day found itself up to the monastery doors, even after a long (and eventually expensive) delay at customs.
Although Chopin was working at various compositions, it was during his time on Majorca that he resumed work on a major set of piano pieces started back in Paris – his 24 Preludes op 28, written in every possible major or minor key. They are the only such set of preludes he ever produced, and they come from a time when his imagination was at its freest and most audacious.
As its name suggests, a musical prelude was traditionally an introduction to a longer and more complex piece. But nor did it have a predetermined character, and Chopin was one of the first to see how it could exist as an entity entirely on its own.
He had two clear models for his own set. The first was Bach’s two sets of 24 Preludes and Fugues (also known as Das Wohltemperierte Klavier) written a century earlier, also in every possible major or minor key, a monumental work important in establishing the rules of modern western tonality. Another was the quirky, miniature 24 Preludes by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, from 1815. Chopin’s own Preludes emulate the free, inventive style of Hummel’s efforts but are far more substantial in manner. Even the simplest of Chopin’s contain a deep emotional resonance, as if their composer were incapable of ever going into creative automatic pilot.
Quite unlike his contemporaries such as Liszt (who loved to fill his music with literary titles and allusions) and Schumann (whose entire musical output was a form of autobiography), Chopin always shrank from making his music about anything other than itself: for a romantic composer, he had a surprisingly absolutist approach. But what his Preludes do undoubtedly express is a vast range of emotional responses, giving us some insight into both Chopin’s inner and outer world during that strange, sometimes farcical winter away with his new lover – a time during which his creativity soared to new heights and his health plunged to new lows.
Although many fine synopses of the Preludes exist which group them according to style and mood, for the sake of simplicity I am listing them here in chronological order, along with a few brief comments on each:
Prelude I – C Major – ebullient but short, built around a rocking, cross-rhythm motive.
II – A Minor – slow, Chopin at his most sinister and dissonant, perhaps composed during a particularly dismal night in the old monastery.
III – G Major (one sharp #) – fast and free with a very rapid left hand, very much in the style of one of his Etudes.
IV – E Minor (#) – a famous elegy, a long, yearning melody with simple chordal accompaniment. According to her daughter, George Sand called this piece “Quelles larmes au fond du cloître humide?” (What Tears [are shed] from the Depths of the Damp Monastery?).
V – D Major (##) – very quick again, harmonically complex and playful, full of unexpected surprises and more cross-rhythms.
VI – B Minor (##) – slow and also deeply elegiac, with a ‘cello like melody played in the left hand accompanied by plaintive, bell-like chords in the right hand.
VII – A Major (###) – one of the shortest and simplest of the Preludes, sweet and graceful.
VIII – F Sharp Minor (###) – turbulent and majestic with complex arpeggiated figurations in both hands, regarded by many as the very finest of the cycle, as well as one of the most difficult to play.
IX – E Major (####) – slow and grand, and mainly confined to the lower, warmer registers of the piano.
X – C Sharp Minor (####) – almost a musical joke, with rapid, downward flourishes answered by slower, pensive chords.
XI – B Major (#####) – short and very graceful, full of bright arpeggiated figures in both hands.
XII – G Sharp Minor (#####) – dramatic and rushing headlong towards an uncertain feeling destination.
XIII – F Sharp major (######) – one of the longer Preludes (also one of only two containing a middle section), in the style of a nocturne, serene and yearning, with long right-hand chords played against a gently pulsing quaver accompaniment.
XIV – E Flat Minor (6 flats – bbbbbb) – rapid, very dark and enigmatic, almost lacking a tonal centre throughout its short duration.
XV – D Flat Major (bbbbb)– the longest of the Preludes, soft and nocturne-like in its two outer sections in D Flat Major framed around a more dramatic middle section in C Sharp Minor. Although widely known as the “Raindrop”, the nickname came from Sand and not Chopin. When Sand first heard the piece, she instantly related its continuous A flat/G sharp ostinato to the rain pattering all day on the monastery roof. But Chopin was furious at her suggestion of any extra-musical associations, reacting in his loftiest, I’m-no-Franz-Liszt indignation: “He was angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds”, Sand recalled. “He protested with all his might – and he was right to – against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents by musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds.”
XVI – B Flat Minor (bbbbb) – very fast, virtuosic right hand semi-quavers, dramatic but touched throughout with a hint of playful humour.
XVII – A Flat Major (bbbb) – another one of the grander preludes (and the longest in terms of bars), with lots of expressive right hand melody and majestic left hand chords. This Prelude also has its own devotees, including the likes of Felix Mendelsohn who wrote, “I love it! I cannot tell you how much or why; except perhaps that it is something which I could never at all have written.”
XVIII- F Minor (bbbb) – Agitated and somewhat improvisatory in character. Full of complex rhythmic divisions.
XIX – E Flat Major (bbb) – joyous and rushing through the air at high speed, though made up of widely spaced (and fiendishly difficult to play) triplets in both hands.
XX – C Minor (bbb) – short and chordal (indeed it is sometimes called the “Chord” Prelude) – later used by Rachmaninov for a set of variations.
XXI – B Flat Major (bb) – slow melody, accompanied by chromatic descensions in the left hand which give this Prelude a real emotional ambiguity.
XXII – G Minor (bb) – short and sharp, a kind of miniature tarantella full of rumbling minor tonalities.
XXIII – F Major (b) – one of the lightest and most playful of the Preludes.
XXIV – D Minor (b) – a suitably stormy finish and also one of the darkest things Chopin ever wrote. Accompanied throughout by a rapid, five-note figuration in the left hand, the right hand plays fragments of angular melody interspersed with dramatic trills and flourishes. At the very end, the music collapses downwards and finishes on three dramatic, unaccompanied Ds, in the very lowest registers of the piano. There is a popular theory that this Prelude dates back several years to 1831, as Chopin’s creative response to the fall of his beloved Warsaw to Russian occupiers.
Chopin finally completed the Preludes in late January 1839, immediately dispatching them back to civilization, namely to his publisher in Paris. But his health was now so bad and Sand so irked by all the practical difficulties they had endured, that they finally saw sense and packed up to go home. Had they stayed one more month in Majorca, Sand later claimed, “we should have perished there, Chopin of melancholy and disgust; I of fury and indignation…”
But even making the return journey was difficult enough. The first part of it almost killed Chopin, as he was forced to endure the elements for many hours in an open donkey cart back to Palma, after which they had to make the boat crossing in company of around 100 pigs, who had been given free run of the deck and whose waste soon filled the air with an unbearable stench. Chopin was at this point “coughing up bowlfuls of blood”.
It was only when they arrived back in Marseille that Chopin was finally able to get the long-overdue medical attention he so desperately needed. “He has stopped spitting blood”, reported Sand hopefully a few days later, “sleeps well, coughs but little, and, above all, he is in France! He can sleep in a bed that will not be burned because he has used it.” Warm rooms and the onset of spring further allowed him some measure of recovery, although his health had been permanently damaged by their winter ordeals.
Chopin and Sands’ relationship was also never quite the same again. Although they would stay together another decade, they lived at separate addresses in Paris while spending the summers at Sand’s opulent home, a chateau (inherited from her grandmother) situated near the village of Nohant in central France. Here Chopin would be somewhat cosseted and allowed to work in peaceful, calm surroundings. He would produce some of his finest works over the next five years.
Neither of them ever forgot their winter in Majorca, and Sand, in a brief lapse from her normally humanistic tones, never quite forgave their unfriendly hosts either, referring to them as “Polynesian savages” and even “monkeys” in a book she wrote about the trip afterwards.
Whether Chopin’s Preludes would have turned out to be quite as extraordinary as they did, had they stayed in Paris, is of course another matter.