The word "prelude" comes from the Latin praeludo. It means "I am entering." Prelude is an ancient musical genre that can be easily modified to meet the requirements of the time.
The birth of foreplay
The prelude dates back to the middle of the fifteenth century. It was originally a short musical (usually instrumental) introduction to a larger piece. Experienced musicians often preferred to improvise instead of a pre-prepared prelude.
Such an introduction gave the performer an opportunity to express himself, to show his ingenuity and musicality. Over the course of several hundred years, the prelude has turned from such an optional improvisational fragment without a definite beginning and end into a small piece of music that no longer allowed improvisation and impromptu. Such preludes were used to open suites and operas in France in the eighteenth century.
Johann Sebastian Bach was the first composer who brought a kind of musical independence to the genre of prelude, separation from major genres. He created a whole cycle of small pieces of music in which preludes and fugues were combined into stable pairs. In the fugue, a musical theme was laid, corresponding to the canons, and in the prelude, the same theme was presented more freely. Fugue is a tough musical form in which a musical theme develops with the help of polyphony or polyphony. In a narrow, more familiar sense, we can say that the singing canon is a fugue, since the same theme is repeated in it with variations, echoing in different fragments of a piece of music, and so on.
Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier has become a veritable encyclopedia of preludes. This work presents all kinds of this piece of music - solemn, mournful, fast, slow, abrupt and continuous. In fact, most of the later composers relied on the work of Bach for their research.
Development of the genre
The prelude was reborn thanks to the Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin. His preludes are romantic, unique, emotional. The cycle of twenty-four preludes can be viewed as a single, perfect piece. Moreover, each of the pieces can be played (and played) separately. In fact, it was Chopin who made the prelude an independent piece of music.
In fact, the prelude is a small piece of music lasting several minutes, usually a small musical theme develops and transforms within the framework of the prelude. There are no rigid canons or regulated forms for these pieces of music.
In the modern world, the prelude has an additional meaning. This word is customary to denote affection preceding sexual intercourse.