The ‘Raindrop’ Prelude
As the storm raged around him, raindrops fell like music on the pianist’s heart.
1838
As the storm raged around him, raindrops fell like music on the pianist’s heart.
1838
In 1838, Chopin and Georges Sand (a lady whose real name was Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin) stayed at a Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa, Mallorca. While seated at the piano during a storm, Sand tells us, Chopin experienced a disturbing dream.
Translated from the French
HE saw himself drowned in a lake; heavy, icy drops of water fell rhythmically upon his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water which really were falling rhythmically on the roof, he denied ever having heard them.
He was even rather annoyed that I should have interpreted this in terms of a harmony made in imitation.
He protested in the strongest possible terms, as he had every right to do, against the childishness of these imitations intended for the ear.
His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, interpreted through sublime equivalents in his musical thought, and not by a slavish reduplication of external sounds.
His composition that evening was certainly full of drops of rain ringing on the resonant tiles of the Chartreuse; but they were interpreted in his imagination and in his melody through tears falling from the sky upon his heart.
Translated from the French
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate her ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.