Chopin's Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4 was one of two of his own preludes played on the organ at his funeral in the Madeleine, Paris, on 30 October 1849. 2:09, with the full piano score on screen, note by note.
One in each key, written in a monastery with no heating
The twenty-four Preludes, Op. 28, run once through all twelve major and twelve minor keys, and were published in 1839. A large part of the set was finished between late 1838 and early 1839, while Chopin was wintering on Mallorca with George Sand and her two children, in the end in a disused monastery at Valldemossa. It rained all winter and his illness worsened there.
This is No. 4, in E minor, marked Largo.
Chopin died in Paris on 17 October 1849, aged 39. At his funeral on the 30th, two of his own preludes were played on the organ of the Madeleine; No. 4 was one of them. He never gave any of these pieces a title or a note of explanation — a prelude normally comes before something, and these twenty-four come before nothing.
It is on the soundtrack album of The Pianist
The 2002 film The Pianist takes its music almost entirely from Chopin — eleven of the twelve tracks on the soundtrack album — and this prelude is one of them.
The note on top barely moves; underneath, it keeps giving way
For most of the piece the right hand simply holds one note. What moves is the left: the same chord repeated, and every few repetitions one note inside it slips down a semitone.
So it feels like standing still on a floor that keeps sinking. The note on top has not changed, but what is underneath it is no longer what it was.
There is one exception — near the end it suddenly rises, falls back, and stops on three very low chords. After that there is nothing.
521 notes in the left hand, 79 in the right
Twenty-six bars, 606 notes (six of them grace notes): 521 in the left hand and only 79 in the right — the left carries eighty-six percent of them. Nearly all of those 521 are the same chord repeated beat by beat, twenty-four to a bar.
The harmony hides inside that repetition: from bars 2 to 12 an inner voice drops a semitone every few beats, and the top of the left hand's range walks down from 64 to 57.
In bar 13 the right hand says a few more words than usual (nine notes, the second-densest bar in the piece). Bar 18 is the one rise — the right hand reaches its highest point while the left hand spreads to its widest, thirty-four semitones across. Bar 19 falls back down.
The last three bars let go: in bars 24 and 25 every note is held for well over a second, and in bar 26 only two left-hand notes are left, at the lowest point in the piece.
The hard part is making five hundred repeated chords sound the same
Nothing here is fast; we rate it 2 out of 5. The difficulty is stamina and evenness: the left hand plays the same chord more than five hundred times, and a few heavy ones are enough to bury the slowly sinking line underneath.
The right hand has the opposite job — it barely moves, but every long note has to be held to its full value.
The last two bars loosen; this version plays the written durations without added rubato.
Others from the same set
There are twenty-four preludes in Op. 28, one per key, most only a minute or two; more will follow.
For more of "the top stays put while the bottom changes": Bach's Prelude in C major, BWV 846.
