Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Performing Preludes

Don't you think it's rather silly to contradict yourself?
Try a different word next time - it sounds less silly

Where's the contradiction?

"We don't know if Chopin intended them to be played as a cycle, although today's pianists usually perform them that way in recital."

David Dubal from an article in The Wall Street Journal

as a cycle they work remarkebly well, for more than a century, why change a winning team?

Abram Chasins discussed playing complete sets in his book, including what Hofmann had to say about it. He said it was something forced on pianists by record companies, which has ended up being a requirement to the detriment of the music.

audiences as well as pianists have become used to the whole of op.28, it's Trrrradition.

I agree. Apparently Chopin himself never played more than four at a single performance. It is also true that most professionals play the whole set, but in itself (at least IMO) it is not necessary.

I would never play them as a set unless it was for a recording. That's about 40 minutes of straight Chopin! Yikes!

Thanks for the reminder chaps ... that even Debussy got into the Preludes act ... I'm busy with Prelude I ... and though at a tempo of Lent et grave ... Claude is decidedly "busy"... I've only sampled up to measure 10 (most of the 1st page from
IMSLP.

Except that they don't work remarkably well as a cycle...the only reason people think they seem to think they do is simply because we've become used to them in that format. Personally, I find them a tedious slog all at once, with the sum being a good deal less than the parts.

And the fact that Chopin came up with a key sequence in which to arrange them for publication says nothing about how he thought they should be performed - if he even imagined they should be performed in concert at all. I think it is just as likely, given his sensibilities, that he would have thought it grotesque and in horrible taste to perform them all at once.

IMO, the only multi-movement pieces of Chopin are the sonatas and concertos. The sets defined by opus number or pieces having the same titles just are not well-suited for single-gulp intake, and I think it is because of sheer programing laziness and timidity that we keep getting recitals of those groupings.

And yes, that kind of programming definitely reflects the priorities of the recordings industry, who liked to market Pianist X playing a complete set of something or another. And the pianists would dutifully go on tour playing stuff in support of the marketing. Now that the old recording industry is rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror, maybe there's a chance musicians will learn that there are more interesting ways to put together a recital than throwing together all of a composer's works in some genre or even worse, doing a gradisose "cycle", like all the Beethoven sonata cycles that always seem in progress.

I like how these quotes somehow sum up the discussion so far. There's since long a tendency for doing "complete" sets because that's normally how we record things. A "Trrrrradition" that arises merely from habit isn't necessarily anything more than a false tradition, is it? The only thing I'm personally against is a sort of uniform view of how things should be played. Just go back in time a century and you'll find that on the one hand there were people like Busoni or Feinberg who did monstrous piano fests with extremely ambitious programs (Feinberg with complete WTC, or complete Scriabin sonatas, or complete Beethoven sonatas, in a season, or Busoni with his generally long and "heavy" programs), while there were people like Rubinstein or Paderewski on the other hand whose concert programs frequently included only selections of miniatures, with only few large-scale works. Just read Rubinsteins biography to see what variety he had in his concert programming - sometimes offering heavy works like Hammerklavier (Godowsky came backstage afterwards thanking him, adding: "But you must practice" ), sometimes offering miniatures like Szymanowski preludes and etudes, Medtner smaller pieces, Chopin miniatures...and so on. Is there any good reason for thinking that the only thing acceptable in the concert hall is to play COMPLETE works?

One thing we know for sure - not all composers that performed their own works thought so. Among Medtner's solo recordings, is there a single "complete" set of fairy tales or other pieces? The concerti (and other large-scale works - I hear he recorded the quintet but it hasn't been published?) are a different story of course. What about Rachmaninoff, and his recordings of selected preludes, etc? Story has it that he never performed his Corelli variations in its entirety in concert but skipped variations here and there. Feinberg reportedly never performed his 3rd piano sonata in its entirety, only in parts - possibly due to the difficulty of this particular piece.

Then again, such attitudes as performing only parts of a work - were they partially because of how different audiences were back then, comparing with today? We are more civilized and mannered these days. Kapell described how he played the Copland sonata in south america where two gentlemen got up and started hitting one another with newspaper, one saying that "this is not music", the other responding - "yes it is!". In one of his Fairy Tales, Medtner writes that a repeat may be omitted if the concert audience seem to be losing their interest. (I don't remember exactly how he phrased it)

Except that's just opinion although you state it as fact.

It's hard or maybe impossible to know whether people thinking the Preludes work well as a set is because they really do or because they are just used to hearing them this way. The only way to judge that would be to get peoples' opinions after they hear the set for the first time. I do think they really work well and don't see any obvious reason why most would find them tedious when played together. They have a huge variety of mood and tempi. They are certainly performed as a set very frequently, and a significant number of great pianists have done so.

I think you're making many assumptions, based on your own perceptions rather than what reality was. For instance, Chopin's Funeral March Sonata was described by Schumann (who, don't forget, introduced Chopin to his learned chums with 'Hats off, gentlemen! A genius!') as 'four of Chopin's wildest children strung together' - and indeed, the March was composed first, with the other movements composed almost as an afterthought to make it into a Sonata. No wonder the March is frequently played by itself. The fact that the four movements sound logical as a Sonata to us is because we're used to hearing it that way, but that wasn't what happened in Chopin's time. But Chopin did compose the Preludes Op.28 as a group, partly in Majorca - whether or not he ever played them all as a set is irrelevant: as I've already said earlier, he had no qualms about just playing the first slow section (Andantino) of his Ballade No.2 all by itself. Would anyone today allow a pianist to get away with doing that? And that's not withstanding the fact that the Andantino ends with a perfect cadence, and could have been a self-sufficient Nocturne if one didn't know any better.....

As for associating the Preludes with the Waltzes, Mazurkas, Ballades, Polonaises, Impromptus, Scherzi, Nocturnes etc, that's talking chalk and cheese. None of the the latter which have the same opus numbers have the same relation to each other as the Preludes have: they were just published together, that's all. And all concert pianists today recognize this, and pick and choose from them (though that doesn't stop a few brave souls like Maria-Joao Pires from performing all the Nocturnes in one concert (and nothing else...) in chronological order in the Proms a few years ago).

And several of the Preludes are very brief, lasting well under a minute, and sounding very insubstantial by themselves - take No.1, for instance, which sounds like, er, a prelude. Chopin never composed anything shorter than several of the individual Preludes. There's nothing to stop an enterprising pianist from using one or other of these Preludes as a prelude to some other piece, as pianists used to do in the Golden Age, but the fact remains that unlike any of Chopin's other pieces grouped under the same opus number (or title), his Op.28 was conceived as a cycle. Which is the way almost all concert pianists of renown play it today.

It's fine to argue this way regarding Ballades, Impromptus, Scherzi and several Polonaises, as these pieces typically (with the exception of some polonaises) were not published in groups but under separate opus numbers. However, Chopin quite frequently took pains in the exact ordering of Mazurkas and other pieces that were to be grouped together, sometimes to create a more logical sequence of keys for example. Read Jan Ekier's comments in the national edition of, say, the mazurkas, for more information - op. 56 was supposedly first grouped with the short fast C major opening the set, followed by the B major one and then the big C minor mazurka. The way they eventually became grouped, there was a logical sequence between the last two - both in C, first in major, then the last one in minor.

Let's see if I'm getting this right - Chopin was so clueless he didn't really know what a sonata was, but still, somehow, for unknown reasons and although it was never explicitly stated, he wanted the preludes performed as a group simply because of some vaguely defined compositional proximity, which substituted for all that was lacking in his comprehension of what a sonata might be. Or something....

That's interesting. But what about the Nocturnes and Waltzes that have the same opus number? Were they also ordered and grouped by Chopin with intent?

Yes, you've got it right

Incidentally, Schumann's Piano Concerto too was never conceived as such - he originally composed the first movement as a concert piece by itself. But his wife egged him to turn it into a 'proper' concerto, so like a dutiful husband,......

And various composers of the day published preludes through all the keys, to be used as that kind of "filler". Chopin would have been familiar with such sets of preludes, and would have seen his own as perhaps a comment of sorts on that tradition.

Chopin revered Hummel, and Hummel was one of the composers who published such a set of preludes in all the keys - it's not outside the realm of possibility that they were the specific inspiration for Chopin's own set, which extended the idea to make them into short, independent pieces. But there's nothing to suggest that Chopin thought his should all be played at once, any more than those of Hummel were intended to be played as a group.

In addition to that, let's not forget that Chopin was greatly influenced by Bach's WTK in his writing - he knew WTK intimately and practiced these pieces frequently. Often prior to a performance (where he played his own works, of course), he would shut himself in and practice Bach several hours.

Did Bach intend WTK to be performed in its entirety...?

There were other sets of preludes in all keys than just Hummels - Joseph Christoph Kessler dedicated his set of 24 preludes op. 31 to Chopin. In return, the German edition of Chopin's op. 24 was dedicated to Kessler.

It is not true by the way that all preludes were written while Chopin was in Mallorca. He started the work in 1835, and the Mallorca trip took place around 1838-39.