5 Preludes from Book I

No.6 Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow)

No.7 Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest (What the West wind saw)

No.8 La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with Flaxen Hair)

No.9 La sérénade interrompue (Interrupted Serenade)

No.10 La cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral)

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

5 Preludes from Op.32

No.9 Allegro moderato

No.10 Lento

No.11 Allegretto

No.12 Allegro

No.13 Grave

Although they bear the same generic title, Debussy’s and Rachmaninov’s Preludes are fundamentally different in nature. Rachmaninov’s are in the same tradition as Chopin’s 24 Preludes Op.28 and Scriabin’s tribute to that set, the 24 Preludes Op.11. They in turn derive from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which is divided into two books each one offering a prelude and a fugue in all 24 major and minor keys. Chopin and nearly all of those who followed him were not very interested in applying themselves to the fugue but the idea of writing preludes in all the different keys was clearly an irresistible challenge – even though one set of 24 was enough for most of them. It was all the more appealing to 19th-century composers since, as long as it was fairly short, the prelude could take any form inspiration required.

For Debussy, whose 24 Preludes were issued in two books of 12 each in 1910 and 1912 respectively, key was irrelevant. While he was obviously aware of the post-Chopin tradition – hence the total of 24 short pieces – he was interested less in expressing an emotional state, as his romantically inclined predecessors had done, than in making external observations. Obviously emotion is not excluded, but his first aim was to persuade the piano to give expression, in whatever key seemed appropriate, to visual images, poetic thoughts and literary, theatrical and even real-life caricatures.

Des pas sur la neige is one of the more personal of Debussy’s Preludes, so much so that it has inspired much metaphysical and psychoanalytical speculation. But since it was written on 27 December 1909, the day after a successful performance of the Chansons de Bilitis, it could another look at Pierre Louÿs’s icy landscape in the Tombeau des naïades, which has much to do with dragging footsteps in the snow expressed by a similar limping rhythm. Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest, a rare Lisztian inspiration of a virtuosity to compare with that of Feux d’artifice at the end of Book II, is a stormy seascape observed by the West Wind, the “dreadfully wild fellow” who recalls similar adventures in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Garden of Paradise.” La Fille aux cheveux de lin, which takes its title from a line in Leconte de Lisle’s poem “Chanson écossaise” set to music by Debussy in 1882, is a direct contrast, a pentatonic characterization of a personality celtic by race and placid by nature.

La Sérénade interrompue, one of the wittiest pieces in the two books of Preludes, is unmistakably Spanish in the guitar figuration preceding the precariously pitched serenade and, after another false start, the flamenco cadenza. The major interruption, provoking an angry response from the serenader, comes in the form of a familiar rhythmic pattern from Le Matin d’un jour de fête in Debussy’s Ibéria. Again there is a direct contrast in the motionless Cathédrale engloutie. Based on legends surrounding the sunken cathedral of Ys off the Brittany coast, it finds its ecclesiastical atmosphere initially in the parallel fourths and fifths of 12th-century organum, its structure in the gradual emergence of the bell tower and associated sounds, its climax in the massively sonorous triads of an archaic chorale, its ending in shrouded echoes of earlier material.

The Rachmaninov prelude above all Rachmaninov preludes, in terms of popularity at least, is the early inspiration in C sharp minor Op.3 No.2. That dramatically doom-laden piece was written when the composer was 19 and it haunted him for the rest of his life – although it seems he didn’t hate it quite as much as he is said to have done. Neither in 1903, when he wrote the Ten Preludes Op.23 nor in 1910, when he came to complete his set of 24 preludes in all the keys in Op.32, did he take the opportunity to write a new example in C sharp minor to replace his youthful shocker.

The Op.32 set, which written not long after the Piano Concerto No.3, is the work of a very much more mature composer than that of the Op.23 set. The stimulus by now was not so much an emotional state – important though that still was – as a brilliant idea. In No.9 in A major the main melodic interest is consigned for the most part to the bottom end of the range while the right hand miraculously sustains both a counter melody and an arpeggio accompaniment. The next two preludes make a pair in that they have an element of the siciliano rhythm in common. Inspired by Böcklin’s painting “The Return,” No.10 in B minor is a tragic conception, more than faintly lugubrious in the chromatic cadences in the outer section and more than slightly violent in the middle. In No.11 in B major, on the other hand, the same dotted-rhythm figure assumes an expression of unassuming happiness. No.12 in G sharp minor calls Ravel to mind in what could almost be an alternative characterisation of the amorous water nymph, Ondine in Gaspard de la Nuit. Another indication of Rachmaninov’s lasting attachment to the early sensation in C sharp minor is that in the last prelude of Op.32 there are veiled allusion to Op.3 No.2. Ceremonial in manner, retrospective in function, massively sonorous in scoring, No.13 in D flat major is conclusive in every sense.