This prelude #4 in e minor is together with # 6 and #7 the easiest piano pieces of Chopin. This means that basically, all piano students have had to play this music. Together with the famous Nocturne #9-2 and Waltz # 19, I consider this to be the most beautiful pieces written by Chopin. Unfortunately, Chopin died rather young and one can imagine how much more treasures he would have written if he lived a bit longer.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was a Hungarian composer and virtuoso piano player in the Romantic music era. He was also a writer, philanthropist,
and promotor of colleague composers of his time such as Chopin, Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, and many others. His performances during
the first half of the 19th century made him famous all over Europe to the level that we now would call a pop star, similar to Elton John,
Billy Joel, Lang Lang, or Yiruma. As a composer, he left behind an extensive and varied treasure of music that influenced
well 19th and 20th-century composers.
Liszt’s Liebesträume or Dreams of Love (1850) consists of three Nocturnes in the style of Chopin for
piano/high voice or piano solo of which no. 3 is the most famous.
It is based on a poem written by Ferdinand Freilgrath and the theme is “Eternal Love” or “Love as long as you can”.
It has three parts and the parts are separated by a Cadenza. A remarkable thing is the key signatures:
it starts in A flat major, then it goes to B major, then to C major and it ends again in A flat major.
This is Chopin’s most famous composition and with over 100 million views on YouTube also very popular.
Chopin believed that only he could perform it well and on the question of whether someone else could perform it beautifully,
he replied “yes, Liszt can”. When Chopin could hear me playing this arrangement for the intermediate player, wherewith the reduction
of the complexity also some of the beauty was sacrificed, he would likely turn in his grave (Paris) or his heart
would miss a beat (in the Holy Cross church in Warsaw, Poland).
A nocturne - as the name discloses - is rather evocative music to be played late in the evening, in contrast to the serenade
to be played early in the evening. Although the nocturne stems from the 18th century, in the 19th century the full growth came with
the works of the Irish composer John Field who wrote some 18 wonderful Nocturnes. This Chopin nocturne has an A-A-B-A-B-A-Coda
form and the A’s and B’s consist of each four measures. But it isn’t a simple repetition of segments since every time
the A and B segments - at least in the original score - got more elaborated. Because measure one is a pickup note, the start of the
sections is the measures 2 A, 6 A, 10 B, 14 A, 18 B, 22 A and the Coda or end starts in measure 26.
In this coda, Chopin repeats parts of the B and A segments and finalizes very softly (ppp).
There are a few explanations for this extraordinary title. My favorite one is a “nude dance, accompanied by song, in which youthful Spartan maidens danced on specific occasions” (Dominique Mondo's Dictionnaire de Musique, Wikipedia). There are three Gymnopédies and this first one was published in the year 1888 and it carries the performance instruction “lent et douloureux” or “slow and painful”.