Turbulent.
That's how Music Professor Jeffrey Kallberg describes Chopin's new prelude in E flat minor, which he recently reconstructed.
Kallberg first stumbled across the piece while doing research for his dissertation at the Morgan Library in New York. And when he realized that no one was working on the piece, he took the opportunity to begin investigating it himself.
"I first ran across it when I was doing my dissertation on compositional process," Kallberg noted.
Now, for over 20 years Kallberg has worked on and off trying to decipher a preserved sketch of one of Chopin's unpublished preludes.
However, it was not until 1999 when Kallberg was presenting a paper at Paris' Sorbonne Institute that he was finally able to make sense of the piece and produce a legible and performable version of the prelude.
Chopin wrote the prelude in E flat minor -- which was nicknamed the "Devil's Trill" for its constant trill in the left hand -- during his getaway stay on the island of Majorca in the Mediterranean Sea.
Although it was never published, it was Chopin's first attempt in writing a series of 24 pieces -- one for each of the major and minor keys signatures.
Chopin did complete the set of preludes known as the Preludes Opus Number 28 -- however the one that replaced the "Devil's Trill" sounds completely different.
Preludes were written to serve as introduction to other pieces, so they are typically quite brief.
But Chopin is noted for transforming preludes from introductory pieces to ones that can stand on their own.
Some may wonder why this short piece of 31 measures -- which last around 43 seconds, depending upon the pianist -- has received so much attention.
According to Kallberg, the reason for this is because Chopin's preludes out among the rest of his work. In fact there is only one other piece of work similar to the prelude.
"This is the first time in a 150 years that we have been able to hear a complete piece that Chopin didn't finish and understand what he might have been working on," Kallberg said.
"The strangest thing about this piece is that it's set over a constant trill in the left hand from beginning to end. That was a kind of sound Chopin had never tried before on the piano, so it was a kind of experiment for him," he added.
This prelude also provides new insight into Chopin as a composer.
"It lets us hear the experiment in piano sound that we didn't know him to be exploring so it really gives us new inside into how he was thinking as a composer," Kallberg said.
Musically, Kallberg describes the piece as a series of triplets in the right hand over a continuous trill in the left hand. However Chopin did not note a tempo mark.
Kallberg's work on Chopin's prelude has been so extended because he not only had to decipher Chopin's scribbled shorthand writing but also had to determine whether this sketch was just a part of one of Chopin's pieces of work or if it was a complete piece of work itself.
"There were two things I had to do," Kallberg said. "Figure out the shorthand version [of the sketch] and figure out what sort of full piece the shorthand version stood for."
"Chopin wrote down just part of what he was hearing in his head. Writing notes on the page was tricky for him so one way around that for him was using shorthand," Kallberg said.
When Kallberg made the first literal transcription -- figuring out all the notes on the staff -- he said he got musical nonsense because Chopin was working really fast.
"You have to massage the notes to see where they make the most musical sense," he said.
Luckily, most of Chopin's other pieces are much neater.
Kallberg has received much attention for to his version of the prelude, but for his colleagues it is not so unexpected that he was able to flesh out Chopin's prelude.
"Kallberg has been for many years one of the world's leading Chopin scholars, and this is not surprising that he was come up with this exciting new discovery," chair of the Music Department Gary Tomlinson commented.
"His interpretation of this page of sketches gives us an entirely new Chopin work and a very good one indeed," Tomlinson added.
Yet Kallberg's version of the prelude is left open-ended, much like how Chopin left his music, according to Kallberg. Even Kallberg admitted that it is possible that he might make further revisions of the current version of his piece.
But for now, Kallberg's version of the piece is scheduled for its first formal performance at The Newport Music Festival in July in Newport, Rhode Island. And while Alain Jazquon will be the pianist, Kallberg plans on attending the landmark event.
