Preludes, Op.28

Twenty four preludes, one in every major and minor key, published in 1839. Chopin worked on them partly during the difficult winter he spent with George Sand at a ruined monastery in Valldemossa, Majorca, where the weather, his health and the miserable local piano all conspired against him. They take Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier as a model but invert its logic. Where Bach paired each prelude with a fugue, Chopin's preludes lead nowhere but themselves, some lasting barely thirty seconds. Schumann called them "sketches, beginnings of etudes, or, so to speak, ruins," and meant it admiringly.