Chopin: Prelude No. 4, Op. 28 (arr. Harb)

Guitarist Tariq Harb performs his arrangement of the beautiful Prelude No. 4 from opus 28 by Frédéric Chopin, written originally for the piano. By Chopin’s request, this piece was played at his own funeral, along with Mozart’s Requiem. Hans von Bülow called the prelude “suffocation“, due to its sense of despair. In fact, Chopin’s last dynamic marking in the piece is smorzando, which means “dying away“. But the prelude may have once been given a title. According to George Sand’s daughter Solange, who stayed with the composer at the monastery in Mallorca when the preludes were written, “My mother gave a title to each of Chopin’s wonderful Preludes; these titles have been preserved on a score he gave to us.“[1] That titled score is lost. But Solange did record the names of the preludes, apparently without assigning the names to the prelude numbers.[2] It is believed that the title “Quelles larmes au fond du cloître humide?“ (&quo