Not for the first time, Chopin took an existing form and raised it to a new level, establishing the solo Prelude as a miniature tone poem conveying myriad emotions and moods. These antecedents rarely stray beyond brief technical exercises. By the early nineteenth century it was common practice for pianists to improvise briefly as a prelude to their performance, an opportunity to loosen the fingers and focus the mind, and this tradition spawned several sets of Preludes encompassing all the major and minor keys, including examples from Hummel (1814), Cramer (1818), Kalkbrenner (1827), Moscheles (1827) and Kessler (1834), whose set is dedicated to Chopin. In Bach’s time a prelude usually preceded something else, whether a fugue (as in his many organ works and the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier) or dance movements in a suite, although Bach himself also composed short independent preludes for the keyboard. But it is hard to think of any piano music less deserving of such pedestrian characterization than these miniature gems, which would, on their own, have ensured Chopin’s immortality. Seven of them last less than a minute only three last longer than three minutes. Thus the opening C major Prelude is followed by one in A minor, G major (No 3) by that in E minor (No 4), then on to D major–B minor, and so forth. Described prosaically, Chopin’s Preludes Op 28 are a cycle of twenty-four short pieces in all the major and minor keys paired through tonal relatives (the major keys and their relative minors) progressing in the cycle of fifths.
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