Frédéric Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude, Op 28, No. 15

Beginning in D-Flat Major, this piece focuses on inner confliction and the contemplation of the solitary self. The composition was born from the mind of Frédéric Chopin in 1858 during his stay at the Valldemossa monastery. Amantine Dupin once commented, "It casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left [Chopin] in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at our "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguishing the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy. While playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself, he saw himself drown in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might—and he was right to—against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky."

Played by an Anonymous passionnée

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[Natt Molena]

Anyone else doing this for GCSE music?

[Afterlife63739]

Heard this while witnessing an argument. Really captivated the sad moment.

[TJ Adebanjo]

Why O why did I choose MUSIC?!?! Why did I allow myself to be lured in by false pretences and shiny instruments that I do not know how to play nor have I ever heard of most of them!! ARGH!

[Joe Martin]

Fucking tell me about it! 4 listening tests on stuff we've almost certainly never heard before. 2 20 mark essays done in less than 1 and a half hours, one on a very particular section of a huge piece of music, and one on anything to do with british pop music ranging from the 1960s to the modern day!

[DaBlackBoi1]

LOL.

I actually witnessed and observed some of the stuff in A Level Music...

Looked like there was too much stuff to do.

[Joe Martin]

Pfft... all you GCSE musicians fretting about your exam, it's piss easy! wait till you have to analyse 2 whole movement's from Beethoven's first symphony at A level and write a whole essay on like 12 bars of it. Now THAT'S hard.

[Olly Nicholls]

Well it's obvious why we are all here...stupid Friday exam.

[SwornDuty]

And now im mostly fucked...

[Lewis Baker]

Funnily enough, my favorite piece in GCSE Music.

Good luck everyone ^.^

[Eoi Snow]

Yup good luck ^^ Something tells me extend writing's gonna be Mozart though :l

[FlyingA1pha]

Exam tomorrow

[Maddie Mavro]

this would be so much cuter if gcse music hadn't killed it