Staying Dry Inside with Chopin's Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28, No 15 "Raindrop"
The Backstory

Funded by a Piano Maker

My work on the twenty-four preludes of Op. 28 began back in 1835, long before anyone started talking about bad weather. My friend Camille Pleyel, who built pianos and published music in Paris, commissioned the whole set from me for two thousand francs. I decided to write one piece for every single major and minor key on the keyboard, arranging all twenty-four of them in a neat musical pattern. Think of it as packing a suitcase with one outfit for every possible mood, from the brightest afternoon to the bleakest night.

A Monastery in the Clouds

To finish the set, I traveled to the Spanish island of Majorca for the winter of 1838 to 1839 with my partner, the French novelist George Sand, and her children. We moved into a former Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa, which sounds romantic until you try heating stone cells in the middle of winter. Scholars still debate whether I wrote all of Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28, No 15 "Raindrop" right there in the monastery or drafted parts of it earlier in Paris. Either way, it was during that damp island winter that I brought the whole collection together into its final form.

Customs Versus the Composer

My health was terrible that winter, with a bad cough that people blamed on tuberculosis, and the cold, wet air did me no favors at all. To make matters worse, the fine Pleyel piano I had ordered from Paris got stuck in Spanish customs while bureaucracy took its sweet time. While waiting for the officials to release my instrument, I had to work on a tiny local piano that was barely up to the job. Trying to shape delicate piano music on a stubborn little box like that is a bit like trying to paint a portrait with a broom.

Blame the Novelist

This brings us to why everyone adds the word "Raindrop" to my Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28, No 15 "Raindrop", even though I published all twenty-four pieces without a single nickname. Later on, George Sand wrote about a stormy night in Majorca in her memoir, Histoire de ma vie. She claimed she came back to find me at the keyboard after a nightmare in which I was drowning, playing a piece while rain beat steadily on the roof. When you live with a famous novelist, you have to accept that your bad nights might eventually end up in print.

Not a Weather Forecast

I actually protested strongly against her story that my music was just a clever imitation of water dripping from the ceiling. Music is meant to express what goes on inside a person, not to do the job of a windowpane during a downpour. Wait till you hear the best part: George Sand never even wrote down which of my preludes I was playing that night. Most listeners point to this fifteenth one, though some experts suspect it might have been Prelude No. 6 in B minor or Prelude No. 8 in F-sharp minor instead.

The Giant Among Miniatures

Whatever I played that evening, the fifteenth piece turned out to be the longest of the entire Op. 28 set, taking between five and seven minutes from start to finish. I marked the tempo Sostenuto in common time, giving the solo piano plenty of breathing room to sing out its opening theme. While many of the other preludes in the collection fly past in a minute or two, this one settles comfortably into the armchair and stays a while. After its dark middle outburst, I bring back a shortened version of that peaceful beginning to close the piece gently.

A Trick of Musical Spelling

There is a neat bit of stage magic in how I built the three parts of this prelude without ever letting go of that famous repeated note. In the calm outer sections in D-flat major, I write that steady pulse on the page as an A-flat. When the music turns dark for the middle section in C-sharp minor, I write that exact same piano key as a G-sharp just to make the sheet music easier for the pianist to read. It is like changing your coat while standing in the exact same spot, so the pianist's finger never actually moves to a new key.

Two Friends, Three Cities

Once I survived Majorca and got the manuscripts ready, the set came out in 1839 in three capitals at once. Ad. Catelin et Cie brought it out in Paris, Breitkopf & Härtel handled Leipzig, and Wessel & Co. took care of London. I dedicated the French and English editions to Camille Pleyel, who had been patient enough to fund the whole adventure. For the German edition, I dedicated the music to the pianist and composer Joseph Christoph Kessler, returning the favor after he had dedicated his own twenty-four preludes to me.

Eagle Wings and Quiet Salons

When my fellow composer Robert Schumann reviewed the published set, he was wonderfully puzzled and praised its originality. He described my preludes as sketches, ruins, and individual eagle-wings, which is a much nicer compliment than calling them unfinished. We have no record of when Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28, No 15 "Raindrop" was first played in public, because I never performed all twenty-four in a row. I preferred to pick just a few at a time for intimate evenings, like my Paris recital at the Salle Pleyel in April 1841.

From Monasteries to Outer Space

In later years, tidy scholars gave the piece extra labels like B. 107 and C. 180 in the catalogues of Maurice J. E. Brown and Józef Michał Chomiński. What really surprises me is where my quiet Majorcan piece ended up more than a century after I wrote it. In 1979 it turned up in the James Bond film Moonraker, and in 1990 the director Akira Kurosawa used it in his film Dreams. By 2007 it was even helping to advertise a video game called Halo 3, which is quite a journey for a piece born on a tiny island piano.