Preludes: The Leading Question Preludes Lead. It is what they do. Inevitably something with a prelude gives way to the thing itself. A future is implied in the word, that something larger is to come, that we are just getting started, that the event in question warrants some kind of small introduction. Some famous preludes—those in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, each of which precedes a fugue, or in his suites, each of which precedes an abstract set of dances; those in similar sets by Shostakovich (his own Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues) or Hindemith (Ludus Tonalis); or the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, which in lighter fare might be labeled an overture but the composer opted to call it a prelude because it not only leads, it longs, pulls, and practically drags you to the opera itself. Preludes make you want, even crave. The idea of a freestanding prelude is, on the surface, almost incomplete—though the above-mentioned preludes do enjoy lives divorced from their consequents, they are known as extractions, that fugues and even an opera are out there somewhere—because it can ask a question that answers little. But the composers of the music on this disc saw this not as a liability but a challenge, even an advantage. If the most cogent definition of music is a set of expectations either fulfilled or frustrated, what’s good for the micro (say the push and pull of tonal resolution on down to non-tonal development) is also good for the macro: the inherent expectation of the form and the inevitable lack is what makes a prelude without subsequent all the more beautiful. Music is probably the only place where such longing doesn’t disappoint—the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard did publish a collection called Prefaces, a series of openers to non-existent works; and the Postmodern trickster novelist Italo Calvino did write If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller which does, with each subsequent chapter, restart the book, but those are exceptional works. Preludes tend to be for the piano (let’s leave out Debussy’s humid idyll Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun though he does use the notion of longing and craving to his distinct advantage and our collective sensual delight), and the piano with rare exceptions tends to be the instrument of the composer, which means we are, in a way, seeing (hearing?) the composer in a more private, intimate light. Sitting at their respective personal orchestra, daring to dream, not worrying about form or function but more trying to bottle a single mood, gesture or idea. And unlike the strictures imposed by the more discursive forms (sonata, fugue, etude, any of the dances) or the more mood-based forms (nocturne, fantasia, “song without words” or “Moment musicale”) “prelude” implies only there will be more. Otherwise, being the most abstract and least expectation-laden of the musical forms, it allows the composer free range. Coming down as it does to us, through history, composers—take Chopin or Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, the Catalan composer Mompou, or even Gershwin’s modest-but-important trio of preludes—have tended to view the pieces as single sighs as well as parts of larger sets, much like individual poems in an otherwise comprehensive manuscript, panels in a set of reliefs. Each prelude either addresses a single issue—be it narrative, mood-based, or strictly musical—or, as in the famous case of Chopin’s so-called “Raindrop Prelude”, addressing a single issue from two perspectives. What is most appealing about a cherry-picked collection of preludes such as this one made by the vibrant, versatile pianist Melissa Marse is that we are allowed multiple windows into the often-quixotic idea of a prelude, from the perspective not only of manifold composers (some tried and true; some newer names) but of a single performer of the single instrument. This concatenation is an exceptionally appealing one because it not only spans centuries and approaches but also styles—like a collection of intimate whispers throughout the ages. Many have heard the Bach, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Gershwin works (especially the slow “Blue Lullaby” movement, which is like Rhapsody in Blue writ small), but the little known 1913 work by Ravel sets well against the works by Albeiniz, Mompou and Tarik O’Regan. In a way this is an old-fashioned record, built as something to which one listens, in order, a balanced progression. The poet T.S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets, quipped profoundly “…in my end is my beginning,” meaning—if one can hazard a guess—that arriving at the ending of something, a life or a work or a phase, one can be reborn, can grow. A set of preludes is on the surface a set of beginnings, but it is also, going a stride deeper, a set of calculated endings, of pregnant silences before the act or dance or piece begins. Daniel Felsenfeld