Caplin, Chopin, and preluding

 I recently (link) wrote about William E. Caplin's Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music (2024), which is in two parts, each at over 300 pages: the first concerns the familiar Viennese trio of composers, about whose music Caplin without doubt has the most detailed and most comprehensive knowledge of anyone alive; but the second part looks at cadences in the earlier 18th and later 19th centuries.

The final section of chapter 8 (of the book's 9) is a survey of all the Chopin Preludes. Of course, the one of interest here is no. 9 in E major. I repeat a paragraph from an earlier post: link.

[Quote from notes in my 1987 JMT article]: "Pieces that appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9 (three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above ^2 implied in the cadence)."  ---- I have already written about this at length: link to the first post; link to the follow-up post. The "short version": Until recently I was comfortable with the comment above, despite the work needed to imagine ^2; Carl Schachter repeated the analysis without giving me credit for precedent (and his editor Joseph Straus failed to catch it); but recently Emily Ahrens Yates revisited the piece and produced a thoroughly convincing analysis that shows the piece does have an ascending Urlinie.

Caplin doesn't dispute the ascending line in the cadence, but he interprets the cadence in a decidedly qualified way:

[Bars 9-12] see the melody again rise stepwise from ^5 in the context of a general ascending-step model-sequence technique. This time, however, the various modal inflections of the harmony yield chromatically flattened ^6 and ^7 degrees; only the final V-I leading into measure 12 resolves the leading tone to tonic in the melody. In itself, of course, this final progression qualifies as cadential, yet because it seems to emerge as the last link in a broader ascending-stepwise sequence, its cadential effect seems rather forced. Combined with the rhetorically powerful dynamic, it is as though Chopin were insisting hard that we take the final progression as cadential, even if it seems to be a part of the broader sequential process.

It is good to see Caplin venture beyond description to interpretation. What his comment suggests to me is indeed the "prelude" in its common 19th century role as introduction to performance of a featured composition. Over time there has been much talk of Romantic fragments, album leaves, and souvenirs, but not often enough about the everyday practice of preluding that was still firmly embedded through at least the first half of the 19th century.

So then, what might the E major Prelude be prelude to? It is clearly a slow and solemn march, and one would expect a serious follow-up, perhaps a sonata-like or large ABA movement at a moderately fast tempo, maybe even in a minor key. That's by no means guaranteed--like fantasies and potpourris, a prelude of any length was expected to offer a variety of textures, tempi, and figures. But preludes--at least as we see them in published collections--could also be short and uniform, and I will assume that here.

Preludes could also be tonally closed, despite our common experience of the very elaborate introductions in virtuoso pieces, where the most showy cadenza is either on or leads to a dominant. 

For some historical examples of the various possibilities as gathered in collections, see Czerny's opus 61 "Praeludien, Cadenzen, und kleine Fantasien im brillanten Style", his opus 696 "60 Prèludes pour Piano," and a book Die Kunst des Präludierens, op.300, about which there is literature and even a Schenker-influenced modern edition. Also see Paul Barbot, L'art de préluder au piano, op.94 (1868); and Clara Schumann, Praeludien (ms. c1895): link.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Józef Elsner, who was Chopin's composition teacher in Warsaw.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Chopin himself, from the Introduction and Polonaise for Cello and Piano, op. 3:

Both versions work appropriately in the manner of the 1830s and 1840s and demonstrate that the EM Prelude can be a prelude, but I admit that I favor the second version because of the continuation of triplet figures.