Composed in 1841, the Prelude Op. 45 is quite different from the short pieces that make up the famous collection of Preludes Op. 28. It’s a more extended rather dream-like piece with an unusual and very chromatic cadenza just before the end. According to the Chopin scholar Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, this is an example of Chopin exploiting ‘colouristic effects unrelated to the thematic material’. Chopin was not known as a great lover of paintings, but he was a close friend of the artist Eugène Delacroix, who was himself passionately interested in music. According to Chopin, Delacroix ‘adores Mozart and knows all his operas by heart; he also spent many hours discussing music with Chopin, a subject about which the composer was famously reticent. Delacroix confided to his journal that Chopin ‘talked music with me … I asked him what establishes logic in music. He made me feel what counterpoint and harmony are; how fugue is like the pure logic in music.’ Eigeldinger has proposed in a fascinating article that the Prelude Op. 45 is a kind of reciprocal gesture: an attempt by Chopin to apply Delacroix’s theories of colour to music. The warm respect these two great creative artists had for each other is demonstrated by an extraordinary account by George Sand of Chopin improvising for Delacroix – the piece that, perhaps, became the Prelude Op. 45:

Chopin is at the piano … He improvises as if haphazardly … ‘Nothing’s coming to me, nothing but reflections, shadows, reliefs that won’t settle. I’m looking for the colour, but I can’t even find the outline.’ ‘You won’t find one without the other’, responds Delacroix, ‘and you’re going to find them both.’ ‘But if I find only the moonlight?’ … Little by little our eyes become filled with those soft colours corresponding to the suave modulations taken in by our auditory senses. And then the note bleue resonates and there we are, in the azure of the transparent night … We dream of a summer night: we await the nightingale. A sublime melody arises.

Nigel Simeone 2010