Prelude in C sharp minor, Op.45

The solitary Prelude in C sharp minor was Chopin’s contribution to a Beethoven Album published in Vienna in 1841 in aid of the fund for the Beethoven monument in Bonn. Written during the composer’s second summer at Nohant, it is an essentially romantic inspiration, a nocturnal kind of improvisation modulating so freely and so spontaneously on every poetic impulse that it floats out of reach of the home key almost as soon as it is established. Basically ternary in form, it restores the C sharp minor harmonies at the appropriate point but only to slip away again, drifting this time into a strange little cadenza of parallel fourths and fifths and then, as if by chance, back into C sharp minor.

The solitary Prelude in C sharp minor was Chopin’s contribution to a Beethoven Album published in Vienna in 1841 in aid of    the fund for the Beethoven monument in Bonn. He clearly did not have Beethoven in mind as he wrote it, however. It is an essentially romantic inspiration, a nocturnal kind of improvisation modulating so freely and so spontaneously on every poetic impulse that it floats out of reach of the home key almost as soon as it is established. Basically ternary in form, it restores the C sharp minor harmonies at the appropriate point but only to slip away again, drifting this time into a strange little cadenza of parallel fourths and fifths and then, as if by chance, back into C sharp minor.         

Prelude in C sharp minor Op.45 (1841)

The solitary and uniquely inspired Prelude in C sharp minor Op.45 that Chopin was persuaded to write for a volume of Keepsakes des Pianistes in 1841 has little in common with the celebrated set of 24 Preludes Op.28 he had completed in Majorca two years earlier. If there is any other aspect of his work it can be aligned with it is the nocturnes. Certainly, it is a nocturnal kind of improvisation modulating so freely and so spontaneously on every poetic impulse that it floats out of reach of the home key almost as soon as it is established. Basically ternary in form, it restores the C sharp minor harmonies at the appropriate point but only to slip away again, drifting this time into a strange little cadenza of parallel fourths and fifths and then, as if by chance, back into C sharp minor.