Luis Dias
I hope your morning paper today arrives with a little respite from the incessant rains and gloom. As I write this, I am grateful just to be home dry.
Not too long ago, a powerful gust of wind blew away and/or broke several roof tiles, leaving us exposed to the elements, which refused to let up. To be fair, it wasn’t as bad as a few years ago, when we lost some 40-odd tiles in one go. It was a gaping hole in the roof. The tired old false ceiling groaned with yet another assault of wetness and dampness.
But in this pandemic situation, getting help (and replacement tiles) was an even more uphill task than usual. Workers were reluctant to come out for fear of the virus. I’m grateful that we could still get it sorted in about 24 hours. In the interim, buckets, pails, basins had to be placed at strategic places and emptied periodically.
As we endured the relentless pitter-patter and splish-splash of drip-dripping rain, my thoughts went to the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude (Op 28, No 15 in D flat major) by Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) and the story behind it. What would he have made of our monsoon had he been caught in one?
The story may be apocryphal, but what is known is that some of Chopin’s Opus 28 works were written while he and his lover, the French novelist George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) and her two children stayed at a Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa, Mallorca in the winter of 1838. The idea had been to seek warmer climes in order to escape the Parisian cold, on doctor’s orders.
Chopin gives a pretty detailed description of their lodgings in one of his letters (Chopin’s Letters, published by Dover Press, 1988):
“Palma, 28 Dec [ember] 1838
— or rather Valdemosa, a few miles away. It’s a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or haircurling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window, outside the window orange-trees, palms and cypresses, opposite the window my bed on rollers under a Moorish filigree rosette. Beside the bed is a square claque nitouchable for writing, which I can scarcely use, and on it (a great luxe here) a leaden candlestick with a candle. Bach, my scrawls and (not my) waste paper – silence – you could scream – there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place.”
The place, and the fact that it offered scant shelter from wind or rain, seems to have taken its toll on Chopin’s physical and emotional well-being.
In her autobiography ‘Histoire de ma vie’, Sand recounts an incident wherein she and her son Maurice returned in the middle of a raging storm from a shopping trip to Palma, to find an agitated Chopin. He had had a dream “while playing the piano” in which: “He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might – and he was right to – against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds.”
The precise piece of music wasn’t mentioned by Sand, but it is widely believed to be Préludeno. 15 from his 28th opus, because of the repeating A flat, with its suggestion of the “gentle patter” of rain, even taking into account Chopin’s “protest” that the prelude was not an imitation of the sound of raindrops, but a translation of nature’s harmonies within Chopin’s “génie”.
The monastery today is a museum, celebrating that fact that Chopin spent time there!
For those interested, there is a good analysis of the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude by pianist Henrik Kilhamn on his ‘Sonata Secrets’ channel on YouTube, followed by a complete performance of the work. If you want to take the story literally, the “lugubrious” central section in C sharp minor can be seen as the ‘bad dream’, with the same insistent note (now enharmonically G sharp, but still the same ‘black’ note) ever insistent, but now in the right hand, in octaves in the climax of the episode.
To German scholar Frederick Niecks, the composition conjures up another visual image: it “rises before one’s mind the cloistered court of the monastery of Valldemossa, and a procession of monks chanting lugubrious prayers, and carrying in the dark hours of night their departed brother to his last resting-place.”
The “Bach” reference in Chopin’s letter is not quite clear. But what it well-known is that Chopin was a great admirer, and the set of preludes was seen as a tribute, with each of the 24 preludes composed in one of the 24 major and minor keys a nod to Bach’s preludes and fugues from books 1 and 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Of all these, the ‘Raindrop’ is the longest in duration.
Franz Liszt showered high praise upon his contemporary Chopin’s preludes, calling them “compositions of an order entirely apart…they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams.”
For sheer poetry, you can’t go far wrong with Vladimir Horowitz’s account of the Raindrop Prelude, also on YouTube. Perfect for a rainy day!