Chopin Preludes for Piano

‘The Preludes are strange pieces. I confess I imagined them differently, and designed in the grandest style, like his Etudes. But almost the opposite is true: they are sketches, beginnings of Etudes or, so to speak, ruins, eagle wings, a wild motley of pieces’ Schumann, 1839.

Chopin’s Preludes have since come to be regarded as one of the monuments of the early Romantic movement in music, and Schumann’s equivocal attitude is at first sight surprising. After all, he himself was the composer par excellence of short, characteristic pieces for piano. Jealousy can be discounted, Schumann being readier than most creative artists to recognise and hail genius when he came across it. More likely he had settled in his mind on Chopin being a composer ‘in the grandest style’. What disturbed Schumann was possibly the fusion Chopin had achieved between brevity and wealth of content: a specific gravity that, note for note over a much shorter span, compares with that of Beethoven at his best.