DECIPHERED: A DEMONIC PRELUDE BY CHOPIN

by Rip Rense

(First published in the New York Times, May 12, 2002.)

For the first time in 150 years, there is a new work by the great fantasist of the piano, Frédéric Chopin. It is just 33 measures long, shorter than the "Minute" Waltz, but it reveals a world about Chopin the innovator and Chopin the bedeviled. Call it Chopin's lost "Devil's Trill" Prelude.

"Here he was, in 1839, at age 29, half-crazed with sickness and dementia, with these nightmarish visions of specters rising up out of the piano, and trying out something completely wild," said Jeffrey Kallberg, a professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania, who reconstructed the piece. "For the first time, we have evidence of probably his most experimental work of all."

Fevered. Anguished. Demonic. Defeated. One can almost hear it all happen in the music: a delirious Chopin furiously trying out ideas, scrawling them in idiosyncratic shorthand further crabbed by illness. (A diagnosis of consumption was disputed.) It's a momentary pianistic freakout, as it were, perhaps reflective of his fabled improvisational flights never captured on music staffs but documented in writings of his paramour, George Sand, and Delacroix.

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TO HEAR THE PRELUDE, CLICK HERE.