Prelude

Chopin wrote 24 Preludes, one for each hour of the day, but I always played them when there was a full moon. There was something plaintive about them, methodical, as if all was right, bright or even rightly, brightly dark about the world. When there was a misty ghostly moon of any size, I played his Nocturnes that then seemed appropriate. But a clear new moon made something spring or jump inside my spirit, and I played new music, atonal, some might say a load of noise, but I always found something musical in it, something secret, something that normal melodic music couldn’t reach. When there was a clear gibbous moon, I couldn’t play any music at all. I knew I couldn’t, so why did I try to do so and fail? When there was no moon at all, I thought the Chopin Mazurkas or Waltzes would be perfect, but as I sat down to play them in such circumstances out came a single unknown Chopin Prelude. The notes seemed to play themselves, even more beautiful than the official canon of Preludes. It was almost as if I were sitting at a piano with a piano-roll that was cut into by the finger strokes of Chopin himself. They were my own fingers that followed the keys as they indented one by one, as if the music played me and not vice versa. The perfect Prelude. I stared into the starless, moonless sky as I followed the notes or the notes followed me. I guessed it was so utterly black because of cloud cover. But at heart I knew it was the perfect blackness. The perfect prelude to death.