Some days heaven seems undecided about whether to weep or pray. Chopin caught one of them. His Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28 No. 15 – the so-called Raindrop Prelude – drips like eternity through a cracked roof, each note a soft reminder that beauty isn’t the absence of suffering, but its echo.
The piece begins with serenity – a lullaby whispered to itself. The left hand rocks gently, almost like the breathing of a child asleep in a storm. Yet within that calm pulse there’s already something ghostly: the same note repeated again and again, a droplet striking a still pool until the pool becomes the droplet. It’s the sound of time remembering itself.
I’ve always thought that Chopin, dying in his thirties and coughing blood in borrowed monasteries, wasn’t composing music so much as negotiating with silence. In this prelude, he makes a pact with the rain – ‘I’ll play if you’ll listen.’ The heavens obliged. What begins as consolation soon deepens into crisis: the middle section erupts into C-sharp minor, where thunder replaces prayer and the raindrop becomes the beating of a terrified heart. The same repeated note that once soothed now condemns – obsession, anxiety, the drip of thought itself when one can’t stop remembering.
It’s the most existential of preludes. The endless note is the monotony of being, that reminder that consciousness never ceases, even when one begs for rest. Kierkegaard might have recognised his own despair in it; Nietzsche, his eternal recurrence; Freud, his compulsive repetition. It’s not the rain outside but the rain within – the part of us that keeps falling, drop after drop, onto the same wound.
And then, miraculously, it clears. The storm withdraws. We return to D-flat major, but something in the light has changed. The peace is uneasy, like a truce signed by angels and ghosts. The rain still falls, yet now it feels like absolution. Chopin gives us not resolution but acceptance – a drenched, trembling grace.
Listening to it, I picture him alone at the monastery of Valldemossa, the Mallorcan rain hammering the shutters while George Sand’s candles sputter in defiance. He’s the frailest of prophets, conjuring the divine from a damp keyboard. Every droplet outside mirrors the one inside, until music and weather become indistinguishable – both the prayer and its answer.
No wonder Sand claimed he dreamt of drowning. We all do. But where most wake gasping, Chopin woke playing.
After the Rain
The silence that follows this prelude isn’t silence at all; it’s the faint shimmer of having survived oneself. In that quiet, the world seems rinsed – not clean, but honest. The rain, like memory, has washed away the pretence of calm and left only truth glistening on the keys.
There are times I return to the piece simply to feel the world weep without shame. The repeated note – that obstinate heartbeat of the eternal – reminds me that life doesn’t end in thunder but in surrender: a slow, forgiving diminuendo into the dark.
When the last drop falls, it’s still raining in the soul.
Wording 