Blood Knowledge in the Preludes of Chopin
In 1837, Frederic Chopin learned from the mother of Maria Wodzinska that her daughter would not be following through on her engagement to the composer. He was twenty-seven. The next year, he took a lover, the author George Sand (born Aurele Dupin). Chopin was no Don Juan. He was slight and sickly, and his music contains some of the darkest expressions of emotions in all of music. Chopin’s ability to convey direct emotional knowledge sets him apart from all other composers. His Preludes, Op. 28, written while he was with Sand on the island of Majorca, exist as perfect distillations and impressions of this knowledge.
How is music made? How does it work its magic on us? Music can arouse exquisite memories and put us in a mood by giving precise aural stimulation in the present moment. Writing on this topic is extremely difficult because music fills that place where words end. The composer Wagner said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” But that was after his break-up with his boyfriend, Nietzsche, who was a great writer. I kid Wagner. He’s right, of course. Music has a subjective precision, an exact way of identifying our experiences that words, which work on a generality principle, will never do. Having said this, can’t we talk somewhat about our profound musical experiences?
According to Chopin’s friends, he was very impacted by the breakup with Maria. He placed her letters and those from her mother in a package on which he wrote, in Polish, "My Sorrow” or “moja bieda,” and he kept them in a drawer until the end of his life.
He had met Sand at a party in 1836. She was short (under five feet), dark-haired, and had large eyes. She smoked cigars. Initially repelled, he commented, "What an unattractive person la Sand is. Is she really a woman?”
Such are the beginnings of love. Words can be good, too.
Conjectures about Chopin’s sex life have filled volumes. Was he really into Sand? Was he heterosexual? There is this very homo erotic letter written to one of his male friends before he left Poland. Today, would we call Chopin asexual? Who knows? What matters here is that as a committed musician and pianist, Chopin was a consummate romantic artist whose music is loved the world over for its melody, improvisatory harmonic changes, and the “knowledge” of his emotional directness. His music reveals a passionate recluse who wrote melodic lines of aristocratic nobility. Those who heard him play the piano often called him an angel, a nymph. Asking if Sand was a woman might be his own questioning of whether he himself was a man.
All of Chopin’s music features the piano. Most of the compositions are for solo piano. He also wrote two piano concertos and some chamber music. All of it is technically demanding, expanding the limitations of the piano. According to the pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen, his “poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation.”
As a musical form, preludes, such as organ pieces that were played before church music, had been written as early as the fifteenth century. The most famous examples are Bach’s preludes and fugues in the two books that make up The Well-Tempered Clavier. Each of Bach’s preludes is followed by a fugue in three or four or five voices, in chromatic order: C major, C minor, C# major, C# minor, D major, etc. Chopin lines his preludes up on the ascending circle of fifths and the relative minor. But really, this is where his duty to the rational form ends. Chopin wrote no partnering fugues, and his preludes are the briefest of impressions without much motivic development. None of the works is longer than 90 bars, and in my recording by Ashkenazy, the longest prelude, the famous ‘raindrop' Prelude No. 15, is much longer than the others, at 5:10. The shortest, No.10, is a mere 25 seconds long. The one before it, no. 9, is a mere 12 bars long. They are really sketches.
These little treasures are Chopin’s unique musical innovation. Most great composers of the day, such as his friends Berlioz and Mendelssohn, felt the need to write imposing operas and symphonies. Chopin didn’t. He stuck with the piano and what he’d learned from Bach. It is reported that Chopin had a copy of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues on Majorca, where he finished Op. 28.
Sand thought the Mediterranean air would be good for Chopin’s health, and so they famously spent the winter of 1838-1839 on the Spanish island shortly after they became an item. From here, he sent his friend, the piano manufacturer, Camille Pleyel, his Preludes, Opus 28, to whom he also dedicated them.
"I am sending you my Preludes,” Chopin wrote in January 1839. “I finished them on your little piano, which arrived in the best possible condition in spite of the sea, the bad weather, and the Palma customs.”
The truth is that Pleyel’s piano showed up only in the last month, and Chopin was unhappy on the island. The locals became inhospitable when they heard that he and Sand were not married. Accompanied by Sand's two children, they took refuge in an old monastery that was inadequate to keep them from the winter weather. To add insult to injury, Chopin had to compose and prepare the preludes mostly on an “instrument” from a local Palma manufacturer. Here was one of the most famous composers of classical music on a Mediterranean island with his lover—sounds great, no? In fact, he was miserable. And we hear it in this composition.
Still, these preludes are bold and glorious. Chopin presents their fundamental emotion clearly, directly and without bothering to develop the themes, as Beethoven would. Although Chopin said that his core models were Mozart and Bach, his romanticism led him in a new direction.
The first prelude recalls for me the moment of sunrise, bursting forth in C major. It’s a thunderous and uneasy sunrise. We hear the chariot and horses of Apollo propelling him over the Eastern mountains through dark clouds. It’s over as soon as it begins.
I find the second prelude absolutely ugly. I can’t stand to play it. The best I’ve come up with is the representation of a crab walking in the island sun.
No. 4 was used by the classical music evangelist Ben Zander in this viral YouTube video.
Zander points out that the melody here is nothing when you look at it on paper. This prelude reveals a musical insight into the whole set: Chopin primarily uses the interval of the 2nd throughout. This is also why these “impressions” foretell Debussy and Impressionism. Zander asks his Ted Talk audience to imagine someone they have lost, and he plays through the prelude again. Loss is a good word. It is said that Preludes No. 4 and No. 6 were played at Chopin’s funeral.
No. 16 is an expression of pure terror. Racing up in the minor scale with twists and turns and back and then up again, we have a mind that is running from monsters and demons. The left hand is insistent and breathless. Chopin wants the pedal held for maximum effect.
What were these demons? The island was making him sicker. He was in his first committed relationship.
Prelude No. 8 takes psychological panic to its fullest. The wild harmonies and dissonance, the throbbing and spinning, are rapacious in their relentless violence on the ear, made possible only by virtuosic playing. There is some peace, but only in the final bars. It is not the peace of understanding or transcendence. It’s just a relief that the whole thing is over. The terror and pain go on and on, and then suddenly, it calms ending with a two bar coda.
The preludes contain thoughtful and meditative and happier pieces, such as the so-called “raindrop” prelude mentioned above. It is structured ABA and, of all the pieces, harks back to Bach. Like Chopin’s Nocturnes, the middle section is dark and stormy compared with the thoughtful and peaceful A sections. No. 3 in G major has a shimmering left hand reminiscent of the light on the waves when out sailing, a bright sunniness resulting from pleasant modulations through the nearby major keys.
My favorite has to be No. 11 in B major. Waltz-like with a beautiful 6/8 lilt, this is the joy of the first summer picnic, complete with strawberries, champagne, and sweet nostalgic memories. The final, no. 24 in D minor, is grand in its sweep and not at all hopeful in its outlook. It is playable only by pianists in top form. For this final of the set, the French pianist and Chopin editor Alfred Cortot wrote in his notes, “of blood.” This comment recalls the “blood knowledge” that the English poet Wordsworth, who lived at the same time as Chopin, writes about in Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey:
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration . . .
Surely Chopin would have agreed with Wordsworth who again writes in the preface to the poem that defined the Romantic age, Lyrical Ballads, "I have wished to keep my reader in the company of flesh and blood.” What Wordsworth writes about poetry being “carried alive into the heart by passion; the truth which is its own testimony,” could be said of the Preludes Op 28.
What would philosophy have to say about Chopin’s music, about music in general? Not a lot. It’s an arena for the future. Philosophers have struggled with a definition of knowledge for thousands of years, including Plato, who came up with the original formulation: justified true belief. The second idea of knowledge that Socrates struggles with in the Theaetetus is our physical, experiential knowledge, the knowledge of sensory perception. When we put our hands in hot water, we do not need to rationally think through whether it happened and whether we learned it is hot. We “know” it is hot. This is a fundamental primitive kind of knowledge, the “blood knowledge” of Wordsworth.
The 19th-century German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that music is the highest of all the arts because it is not a “representation” of ideas but “rather it is the Will itself.” In the nineteenth century, music was seen as a way to attain knowledge of transcendent reality.
Chopin's philosophy seems to be directly acknowledging and expressing the feeling, the perception. He refused to put representative titles to the pieces such as Schumann and Liszt were doing with their own works. Chopin insists on pure music, on getting in touch with his feelings as the source of reality. There is no need to think about it further. The forms of Bach and Mozart can bring him, first, a vehicle of expression, and second, the ability to commit to it to paper. From there, he roams into the world of emotion. Some ideas need developing. But Chopin is ok just presenting the feeling directly, whatever it is, being raped, of transcendent joy, or incredible loneliness.