Preludes misc

The Ten Preludes, Op.23, were written in 1904 and the Thirteen Preludes, Op.32, six years later. Including the notorious C sharp minor, Op.3, No.2, that makes a total of 24 preludes in all the keys, in emulation of Chopins’ Op.28. However, although Chopin was Rachmaninov’s inspiration - in the sense that, had not Chopin written 24 Preludes in all the major and minor keys, it is highly unlikely that Rachmaninov would - they are all strongly individual and highly imaginative. There is nothing in Chopin like the witty introduction to the Op.32 set, where the C major arpeggios constantly hit upon an alien A flat or B flat and deflect the harmonies in impulsive tangents from the key centre. The nearest comparison for the melodic decoration of Op.32, No.5, is in Debussy’s Preludes rather than Chopin’s, and no one who knows the C minor Piano Concerto could mistake the authorship of the related Preludes in C minor and E flat major from Op.23.

The E flat minor Prelude, Op.23, No.9, must derive from the Chopin Etudes, with its right-hand alternation of thirds and sixths, and yet in the melodic shape described by the left hand it is pure Rachmaninov. The F minor, Op.32, No.6, is an agonisingly tragic inspiration with more harmonic enterprise than the composer is usually credited with. The F sharp minor, Op.23, No.1 is not the soprano song it apparently sets out to be: with the entry of an answering bass voice, it develops into a surprisingly dramatic exchange. The B minor, Op.32, No.10, said to be inspired by Böcklin’s painting The Return, is perhaps the greatest of Rachmaninov’s shorter pieces, with a strenuously orchestrated middle section that looks like Scriabin and sounds as massively substantial as only Rachmaniinov could. The G sharp minor, Op.32, No.12, exchanges the left-hand and right-hand roles of the G major prelude until the melody forces itself upwards and changes the whole character of the piece; and the B flat major, Op.23, No.2, is another of Rachmaninov’s brilliant fanfares.

Including the early and notoriously popular Prelude in C sharp minor - which its composer disliked far more keenly than Beethoven disliked his Variations in C minor - Rachmaninov wrote 24 preludes in all the keys, just as Chopin had done before him and Bach before that. The Ten Preludes, Op.23 were completed in 1903, two years after the Second Piano Concerto in C minor, and the Thirteen Preludes, Op.32, followed in 1910, a year after the Third Piano Concerto in D minor. The G major Prelude is a particularly delightful invention in a lucid two-part texture, with semiquaver quintuplets in the left hand interestingly set against a melodic line based on quaver triplets in the right hand. One of Rachmaninov’s greatest inspirations, the ballade-like B minor Prelude has appealingly poetic outer sections (based on a little rhythmic figure which echoes through much of the Op.32 set) and a most strenuously orchestrated middle section which looks like Liszt and even more like Scriabin but which sounds just like Rachmaninov.