Chopin, Mompou, Merlini: Valldemossa

Valdemossa

At Valldemossa, a few months in Chopin’s life acquired an afterlife that extends far beyond the winter of 1838, 39. The former Carthusian monastery, where he stayed with George Sand, became inseparable from the memory of the 24 Préludes, op. 28. Chopin brought much of the collection with him, completing and revising it there. Mompou later joined this history of remembrance, serving on the jury of the first international Chopin piano competition at Valldemossa in 1960. The place brings the two composers into a shared history of listening, suggesting a way into a programme in which a brief passage of music crosses the distance between two creative lives.

That passage is the seventh Prelude of op. 28, sixteen bars in A major which Mompou takes as the theme of his Variations sur un thème de Chopin. Heard first within Chopin’s collection, then at the beginning of Mompou’s work, it changes its function while retaining its identity. A self-contained piece becomes the point of departure for a sequence of transformations. We hear a musical thought sustaining a life beyond the form in which it first appeared.

Chopin’s preludes invite such reflection through the relationship between their title and their substance. The older practice of preluding prepared an instrument, a key or a listener for something to follow. In op. 28, that preparatory gesture acquires the expressive weight of an independent composition. An opening can contain the decisive event of a work; a few bars can establish a character with such concentration that further development would alter its nature. With little time to settle into familiar expectations, we discover the logic of each piece through the gestures by which it unfolds.

The collection gives this diversity a clear tonal order. Major keys progress around the circle of fifths, each followed by its relative minor: C major and A minor, G major and E minor, and so on. The shared key signatures of each pair coexist with striking differences of movement and expression. The first Prelude’s restless figuration is followed by the second’s hesitant melody over a disquieting accompaniment; the quick motion of the third yields to the fourth’s slow chromatic descent. These changes make the interval between pieces part of the experience of the whole. However one understands the larger unity of op. 28, its ordered succession continually renews the conditions under which a new voice is heard.

In the E minor Prelude, No. 4, much of the melody remains close to a single pitch while the accompanying chords shift beneath it. The smallest downward movement within those chords changes the pressure surrounding the melodic line. Listening follows two different rates of change: the apparent reluctance of the voice to move, and the persistent alteration of its harmonic support. When the melody finally expands, its urgency has already been prepared by what happened underneath. The pause before the final cadence prolongs this dependence on expectation. Silence becomes a moment in which the preceding harmony remains active in the listener, even as its sound recedes.

The fifteenth Prelude, in D flat major, approaches continuity through a different means. A repeated A flat persists through the opening section and returns, respelled as G sharp, in the darker central section in C sharp minor. The same sounding pitch belongs to radically altered textures. What first accompanies a cantabile line acquires an increasingly insistent presence within the central writing; when the opening material returns, we recognise it through the memory of that transformation. The familiar association of the piece with rainfall can suggest an image, while the music itself offers a more exact source of its power: something remains, and everything around it changes its meaning.

Elsewhere, movement across the keyboard becomes integral to the musical thought. In the sixteenth Prelude, rapid right-hand figuration gives urgency to the harmonic course; in the eighteenth, broken gestures suggest the freedom of recitative. The twentieth concentrates its weight in chords, then revisits its material at softer dynamics, making a change of distance audible within a compact design. The final Prelude brings a more forceful ending, with its three isolated low Ds. Chopin’s legacy includes this whole range of ways in which the instrument can speak, from the slightest inflection to a gesture of overwhelming physical force.

The Prelude in C sharp minor, op. 45, composed in 1841, opens a further perspective. Its flowing accompaniment supports a melodic line whose harmonic surroundings move through a succession of keys, and phrases overlap so that an arrival can also initiate the next departure. The effect of improvisation depends upon this sustained mobility. Towards the end, the cadenza briefly loosens the regular measure of the music. Placed after op. 28, this Prelude reveals how an idea can establish its character through the course of its wandering, with each new harmony allowing an earlier gesture to be heard differently.

The A major Prelude which Mompou chooses offers a concentrated balance of song and dance. Its triple metre and dotted rhythm recall the mazurka, while the melody moves within a poised succession of short phrases. The second half revisits the first, reaches higher, gathers harmonic tension and settles into its cadence. Those sixteen bars contain repetition and departure in finely judged proportions, giving Mompou a theme whose recognisability can survive considerable alteration. A familiar melodic contour becomes a measure of how far the music has travelled.

Begun in 1938 in connection with a proposed collaboration with the cellist Gaspar Cassadó, the Variations reached their complete form in 1957. Mompou states Chopin’s Prelude before allowing his own harmonies to enter in the first variation. The tune and its rhythm remain readily audible, while additional notes and the movement of inner voices subtly alter the character of the chords. Recognition and discovery take place together: the melody belongs to a memory, the sound surrounding it to the act of remembering.

This relationship becomes physical in the third variation, written for the left hand alone. The melody is threaded through arpeggiated accompaniment, requiring one hand to create distinct layers of sound. The ear hears a sustained voice and a moving background whose continuity depends upon touch, timing and resonance. Here something shared by Chopin and Mompou becomes tangible: the piano’s capacity for song is an achievement of the relationship between sounds, through the weight of an attack, the continuation of a phrase and the harmonic life that surrounds it.

The fifth variation, Tempo di Mazurka, makes explicit the dance suggested by the theme; the ninth transforms it into a waltz. Mompou recalls forms central to Chopin’s imagination as well as the notes of a particular work. Between these dances, the sixth variation’s Recitativo changes the manner of utterance, and the seventh’s Allegro leggiero brings a more mobile articulation. A dance establishes a recurring pulse against which a phrase can lean or hesitate; a recitative follows the apparent necessities of speech. Each gives the borrowed melody another way of inhabiting time.

In the eighth variation, repeated chords and a descending bass support a cantabile line, recalling a type of writing encountered in Chopin’s E minor Prelude. We have already heard how an accompaniment can determine the expressive course of a melody. Mompou draws our attention to the internal life of the sonority. Added notes colour the harmony, and the spacing of the voices affects the degree of intimacy or openness we hear. The musical surface may appear unhurried, yet its changing relationships ask for continuous attention: we can follow the tune while hearing the chords as events with a presence of their own.

The tenth variation, Évocation, extends remembrance beyond the chosen theme. Within its central section, Mompou introduces the melody from the slow portion of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. Transposed into A major and recast in a texture resembling a chorale, the quotation arrives with a different weight from that of its original setting. Another part of Chopin’s world has entered the music. For a listener who recognises it, the experience carries two memories at once: the melody as it once sounded, and the sound it has now become. Even without recognising the source, one can hear the change of manner.

The final Galope gathers considerable virtuoso energy before yielding to an epilogue marked Lento. Here the theme is expanded and reharmonised, recovering its contours within a quieter span of time. The return is affected by the intervening variations: after so many changes of character, even a familiar phrase has acquired a history. This is perhaps the deepest affinity between the two main works on the recording. Both make concentrated musical ideas answerable to what comes before and after them. In Chopin, the succession of preludes continually changes the scale of our attention; in Mompou, successive transformations deepen our knowledge of the same material. Their intimacy grows from the precision with which each sound alters our awareness of the next.

Leonardo Merlini’s Prélude au silence, marked Lento espressivo, provides a brief contemporary coda. Its title offers a final perspective on the programme: a prelude may also lead towards the silence in which what we have heard continues to resonate.

Through these works, Valdemossa becomes a place of return in the imagination. Music travels beyond the circumstances of its creation, entering another composer’s language and another listener’s experience. Mompou’s transformations reveal how much remains available within Chopin’s sixteen bars, as a remembered phrase acquires the immediacy of something being discovered.