The Music and Poetry of Chopin's Raindrops

Rain Clouds in California.

The most famous piece of "rain" music in the classical canon is Fryderyk Chopin's Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15.  Several contemporary poets wrote about this work for the anthology published in 2010, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse.

To accompany the readers on their Chopin-inspired journey, here are some links to various pianists' interpretations of the Prelude:

• Artur Rubinstein (a classic)
• Martha Argerich (a classic)
• Valentina Igoshina (with the pianist as a romantic star)
• Yundi Li (fast, elegant, and delicate)
• Evgeny Kissin (with a romantic painting as a backdrop)
• Grigory Sokolov (extra slow and expressive)

Prelude in Majorca

Christine Klocek-Lim

The wet day carried rain into night

as he composed alone.

With each note he wept

and music fell on the monastery,

each note a cry for breath

his lungs could barely hold.

Even as his world

dissolved around him

“into a terrible dejection,”

he played that old piano in Valldemosa

until tuberculosis didn’t matter;

until the interminable night

became more than a rainstorm,

more than one man sitting alone

at a piano, waiting

“in a kind of quiet desperation”

for his lover to come home

from Palma.

When Aurore finally returned

“in absolute dark”

she said his “wonderful Prelude,”

resounded on the tiles of the Charterhouse

like “tears falling upon his heart.”

Perhaps she is right.

Or perhaps Chopin “denied

having heard” the raindrops.

Perhaps in the alone

of that torrential night
he created his music simply

to hold himself inside life

for just one note longer.

Notes:

Prelude No.15 in D-flat Major, Op. 28. 

Quotes from Histoire de Ma Vie (History of My Life, vol. 4) by George Sand (Aurore, Baronne Dudevant).

(c) 2010 by Christine Klocek-Lim, published in Chopin with Cherries (Moonrise Press, 2010).

Chopin’s “Raindrop”

Cheryl M. Thatt

A steady rain

drop

drips down

insistent as the minutes

he looks out the window

cannot escape it.

He translates rain

drop

damp spirit

travels inward

passionate

notes whittle away the dreary

steady rain

drop

a clock

in the distance punctuates the gray day

wrestling with his own dark language

his soft fingers caress the keys to sanity

slowly he shapes adversary into ally…

pounds out melancholy

drop

by precious damn drop…

A steady rain

drop

dripped down

like the click of a shutter

slippery hours

captured forever.                                                                  

(c) 2010 by Cheryl M. Thatt, published in Chopin with Cherries (Moonrise Press, 2010).

Prelude in D-Flat Major, Opus 28, No. 15

by Carrie A. Purcell

You have to

my teacher said

think of that note like rain,

steady, but who,

my teacher said

wants to hear only that?

On Majorca in a monastery

incessant coughing

covered by incessant composition

and everywhere dripping

sotto voce

move the rain lower

let it fill the space left in your lungs

let it triumph

We die so often

we don’t call it dying anymore

(c) 2010 by Carrie A. Purcell, published in Chopin with Cherries (Moonrise Press, 2010).