Years later, in the midst of one of his infrequent concerts, he saw demonic figures arising from inside the Pleyel grand piano he was playing. This was not the only time Chopin had such an experience, by the way. (The prelude is written in an A-B-A form.) The story goes that when he was composing the prelude in D-flat major-at night, by candlelight of course, during a storm-he had a hallucinatory vision of demons arising from the inside of the piano during the middle section of the prelude. Some of them are endearing and simple, some are extraordinary technical challenges. The Preludes themselves are 24 short pieces, one in each of the major and minor keys. And it was here, during endless monsoon-type rain that he wrote the majority of what were to become his Opus 28 Preludes. Chopin arranged for an upright piano-one of the few on the island-to be moved-by oxcart-up the hill to the house. They finally did find a place to stay, an abandoned stone farm house out in the middle of nowhere, high on a hill. Majorca was an extremely Catholic island, and because Sand and Chopin were not married, they could not find any place that would except them. The trip could not have been more poorly thought-out, and the extremely bad weather they encountered-non-stop rain-was just the opposite of their expectations. This was in 1838, when Chopin was 28 and Sand was 34.

Alarmed at his poor health, one of the first things Sand did was to arrange a trip to the Spanish Mediterranean island of Majorca in order to save his health-or, at the very least, to get his health back to a passable state. She was extraordinary intellectual, equally sensitive emotionally, masculine in her demeanor (she wore pants and smoked cigars), and easily dominated Chopin. As the author of a number of novels, Aurore Dupin wrote under the nom de plume George Sand.

Sand was already more famous than Chopin. There, he moved in the highest of artistic society-it is astonishing how many great artists of every stripe lived in Paris in the early decades of the nineteenth century-and soon he met George Sand, the novelist, with whom he had a lengthy and volatile relationship. He had moved, permanently as it turned out, to Paris when he was twenty years old. Some days were good, many days were bad, some days were horrible. For the next twenty years-until he died-it was his daily companion. I’ll try to capsulize that story here.Ĭhopin had contracted tuberculosis at the age of 19. There is quite a story behind this “Raindrop” prelude of Chopin. CHOPIN PRELUDE IN D-FLAT MAJOR, OPUS 28, NO.

Prelude in d flat major