When Chopin traveled from Paris to Majorca in 1838 in the company of George Sand and her children, he had finished only two preludes of the 26 he was going to compose. But the remaining ones were sketched out. He had worked on them for long periods, in 1836 and 1837, and his intention was to finish them there, in the peace and quiet offered by the "island of calm", as it was then called. We know that the Mallorca winter proved to be not very calm and that the stay was not entirely pleasant, but Frédérick still managed to finish his preludes.
Its fabulous construction ("I travel through strange spaces" wrote Chopin) was witnessed by Georges Sand:
"... In those moments he composed the most beautiful of those brief pages that he modestly called preludes. They are masterpieces. Several of them bring to mind [...] funeral songs.... Others are melancholy and soft [...] Others bear a mournful sadness and at the same time they enrapture the ear, they tear the heart."
Camille Pleyel, his friend and publisher in Paris, was handed the finished preludes in January 1839. For all of them, Chopin asked for four thousand francs, the approximate equivalent of about three months of teaching. Dedicated to Pleyel, the French edition appeared in September of that year. Shortly thereafter, they were published in Germany and England.
Prelude No. 6 in B minor
Unabashedly steeped in "a mournful sadness", the brief piece of fewer than two minutes length claims from the left hand the steady sustaining of an unremarked lament, a chant, an elegiac melody, while the right hand plucks simple chords with regularity.
The prelude was played for Chopin's funeral (also No. 4) by the organist of the Madeleine church. We have no doubt of the emotion that must have gripped the souls present on that October 30, 1849, at the last farewell to this other magnificent but complicated soul that Chopin was.
The rendition is by South Korean pianist Chi Ho Han, at the 2015 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
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