Chopin's Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4 was one of two of his own preludes played on the organ at his funeral in the Madeleine, Paris, on 30 October 1849. 2:14, with the full piano score on screen, note by note.
One in each key, written in a monastery with no heating
The twenty-four Preludes, Op. 28, run once through all twelve major and twelve minor keys, and were published in 1839. A large part of the set was finished between late 1838 and early 1839, while Chopin was wintering on Mallorca with George Sand and her two children, in the end in a disused monastery at Valldemossa. It rained all winter and his illness worsened there.
This is No. 4, in E minor, marked Largo. No. 7, in A major, is already on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_mlGCR97g
Chopin died in Paris on 17 October 1849, aged 39. At his funeral on the 30th, two of his own preludes were played on the organ of the Madeleine; No. 4 was one of them. He never gave any of these pieces a title or a note of explanation — a prelude normally comes before something, and these twenty-four come before nothing.
It is on the soundtrack album of The Pianist
The 2002 film The Pianist takes its music almost entirely from Chopin — eleven of the twelve tracks on the soundtrack album — and this prelude is one of them.
The note on top barely moves; underneath, it keeps giving way
For most of the piece the right hand simply holds one note. What moves is the left: the same chord repeated, and every few repetitions one note inside it slips down a semitone.
So it feels like standing still on a floor that keeps sinking. The note on top has not changed, but what is underneath it is no longer what it was.
There is one exception — near the end it suddenly climbs to the highest point in the piece, falls all the way back, and stops on a single chord with both hands silent. Then two very quiet chords and one long low note, and that is all.
521 notes in the left hand, 83 in the right
An upbeat plus twenty-five bars; 604 notes sound (606 on the page, two of them the second half of a tie and not struck again; six are grace notes). 521 are in the left hand and only 83 in the right — the left carries eighty-six percent of them. Nearly all of those 521 are the same three-note chord repeated beat by beat, twenty-four to a bar.
The harmony hides inside that repetition: from bar 1 to bar 10 the lowest note of the left hand walks down a semitone at a time from G3 to B2, while the right hand mostly just holds the same B.
In bar 12 the right hand runs nine notes for the first time; from bar 13 the same road is walked again. Bar 16 is marked stretto and carries the one turn in the piece. Bar 17 is the single rise — the right hand reaches its highest note, C6, while the left spreads to its widest, B1 to A4, thirty-four semitones across. Bar 18 falls back down.
The last three bars let go: after one chord in bar 23 both hands fall silent (there is a fermata over the rest), bar 24 is two pp chords, and bar 25 leaves only the final E minor chord, its bass on the lowest E1 in the piece, held until the sound dies away.
The hard part is making five hundred repeated chords sound the same
Nothing here is fast; we rate it 2 out of 5. The difficulty is stamina and evenness: the left hand plays the same chord more than five hundred times, and a few heavy ones are enough to bury the slowly sinking line underneath.
The right hand has the opposite job — it barely moves, but every long note has to be held to its full value.
The last few bars loosen. The source used here is a transcription that records the tempo beat by beat (twenty-four marks), and the timeline follows it — so that loosening comes from the source, not from an even grid.
Others from the same set
There are twenty-four preludes in Op. 28, one per key, most only a minute or two; more will follow.
For more of "the top stays put while the bottom changes": Bach's Prelude in C major, BWV 846.
