Sad & Beautiful Chopin: 5 Calm Pieces | Nocturnes & Preludes In Minor Keys

Five Chopin pieces, all of them in minor keys, played end to end. About twenty minutes, no talking, no gaps.

0:00 Nocturne in C-sharp minor, B. 49
4:38 Nocturne in F minor, Op. 55 No. 1
10:00 Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17 No. 4
14:28 Prelude in B minor, Op. 28 No. 6
17:03 Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4

Three of these five point at the same afternoon.

The Nocturne in C-sharp minor is from 1830, around the time he left Poland and did not come back. He sent it to his older sister Ludwika to practice. It was not published until 1875, twenty-six years after he died.

The Nocturne in F minor belongs to the Op. 55 pair, dedicated to Jane Wilhelmina Stirling, a Scottish pianist who had been his student. She took him on a tour of England and Scotland in 1848, quietly paid the debts it left behind, and a year later paid the entire cost of his funeral. She also covered Ludwika's travel from Warsaw so his sister could be there.

The Mazurka in A minor was published in 1834, while he was alive, which is less ordinary than it sounds for this repertoire. The mazurka was a Polish country dance he had heard played by village bands as a boy, and he kept writing them his whole life, more of them than any other kind of piece.

The Prelude in B minor and the Prelude in E minor were both played on the organ at that funeral, at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris on 30 October 1849, alongside Mozart's Requiem. In the B minor the melody sits in the left hand, underneath, which is not where you expect to find it.

That is the thread, if you want one. It is also just twenty minutes of Chopin in minor keys, which needs no thread at all.
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