Chopin, "Raindrop" Prelude

 
It is customary to affirm that Chopin would have composed some of the 24 preludes op15 in a former Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa, in Mallorca, the last destination of a harrowing vacation in the company of George Sand and her children, escaping the Parisian winter, in 1838-39.

A later account by the writer seems to support this opinion. Furthermore, we would all like to believe that one evening Chopin greeted Sand and her children – on their way back to the monastery after their nocturnal explorations in the rain – with the first sketches of Prelude No. 15 in D-flat, the favorite candidate to claim the popular nickname, "Raindrop".

Sand writes: 

"... Then he would make an effort to smile and play for us melodies he had just composed [...] In those instants he would compose the most beautiful of those brief pages that he modestly called preludes...".

"His composition that night was full of the raindrops that resounded on the sounding tiles of the Charterhouse, but they had become in his imagination and in his singing tears falling from the sky, on his heart." 

Where does all this happen? In Valldemossa, naturally, since Sand refers to the Charterhouse and since the previous lodgings did not encourage touring the surroundings in the rain. Before arriving at the abandoned monastery, the travelers had tried their luck in two other lodgings.

Looking for accommodation

The unique family had arrived in Palma de Mallorca in the first days of November 1838 and rented some miserably furnished rooms in the house of a barrel maker, since at that time of year there was no hotel. Tired of the noise of the chores, they accepted the offer of a rich bourgeois to move into his property, in a small village on the outskirts of Palma. There Chopin rents an old and somewhat rickety upright piano, a pianino, where he works as best he can, until the rich bourgeois invites them to leave because so much cough is suspicious. Finally, they will end up renting some "cells" in the now famous Cartuja, about fifteen kilometers from Palma, in the mountains. The travelers moved there, pianino included, on December 15.

The Preludes, finished

A month before, that is, as soon as they arrived in Palma – and probably still at the house of the barrel maker – Chopin writes to his friend Fontana: "very soon you will receive the preludes". So, it follows that if they were not finished they were certainly very advanced.

It is January 22, 1839, when he sends them to his publisher and friend Camille Pleyel, asking for them 1,500 francs for their edition in France and England. He has finished their revision on the piano sent precisely by Pleyel, which has been removed from customs at great expense and then wearily transported to the charterhouse.

So the music full of raindrops turned into tears that Sand heard that night was probably the revised, corrected and final version of Prelude No. 15, and not a composition of recent inspiration, from only a few hours before. In any case, she was not attending a minor event.

The raindrop

Of all "those short pages that he modestly called preludes", No. 15 is one of the few that long exceed a minute or two.

It begins with a nostalgic and evocative melody in a major key, D flat, accompanied by a delicate left-hand ostinato on a single note (the raindrop?).

1:50  A somewhat terrifying progression opens up in the minor key, with the ostinato much more pronounced and now entrusted to the right hand. After a few repetitions, a variation is led by the right hand in 3:48.

4:47  Three passing notes indicate the return to light, taking up the initial motif that, after a pause (5:20), is heading to its end, the ostinato, dying away.

The pianist Suncica Randjelovic – of unknown origin – gives us here a quite right rendition in an original and novel "video clip".