Prelude (music)

A prelude is a short, flexible musical form that can vary widely from one piece to the next. In the Baroque period, it typically opened longer, more complex movements, while in the Romantic era it often stood alone as an independent work. The piece usually repeats a small set of rhythmic and melodic ideas and has an improvisatory feel. The term can also refer to an overture, especially for an opera or oratorio.

The pairing of a prelude with a fugue, both in the same key for solo keyboard, has a long history in classical music. Many composers have created such works, largely inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s two books of preludes and fugues, *The Well-Tempered Clavier* (completed in 1722 and 1742). However, Bach was not the first: Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer wrote a 20-key cycle in his 1702 work *Ariadne musica*. Numerous composers have since produced sets of 24 preludes, including Bach, Chopin, Scriabin, Shostakovich, and Debussy.

The earliest notated preludes were organ pieces introducing church music, with the oldest surviving examples being five brief *praeambula* in the Ileborgh Tablature of 1448. Soon after came freely composed, improvisatory preludes for the lute and other Renaissance string instruments, originally used to warm up the fingers and check tuning and sound quality—as seen in a 1508 collection by Joan Ambrosio Dalza titled *Tastar de corde* (Italian for “testing of the strings”).

Keyboard preludes emerged in 17th-century France as unmeasured preludes, where the performer decides each note’s duration, serving as introductory movements in harpsichord suites. Louis Couperin (c.1626–1661) was the first composer to embrace the genre, and harpsichord preludes were used until the early 18th century by composers such as Jean-Henri d’Anglebert, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, François Couperin, and Jean-Philippe Rameau (whose first printed piece in 1706 was a prelude). The last unmeasured harpsichord preludes date from the 1720s.

In 17th-century Germany, the prelude developed into a sectional form similar to keyboard toccatas by Johann Jakob Froberger or Girolamo Frescobaldi. Northern German composers like Dieterich Buxtehude and Nikolaus Bruhns combined free improvisatory passages with strict contrapuntal sections (often brief fugues). Outside Germany, Dutch composer Abraham van den Kerckhoven used this model for some of his preludes. Southern and central German composers, however, kept their preludes improvisational with little or no strict counterpoint.

During the second half of the 17th century, German composers began pairing preludes (or toccatas) with fugues in the same key. Johann Pachelbel was among the first, though Johann Sebastian Bach’s prelude-and-fugue pieces are far more numerous and famous today. Bach’s organ preludes are diverse, drawing on both southern and northern German influences, and most use theme-and-variation form, employing imitation, inversion, modulation, or retrogression of the theme.

Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer was an early German composer to adopt the late 17th-century French style for harpsichord music, replacing the standard French overture with an unmeasured prelude. His *Ariadne musica* is a cycle of keyboard music with pairs of preludes and fugues; the preludes vary widely and follow no single model. This work foreshadowed Bach’s *The Well-Tempered Clavier*, two books of 24 prelude-and-fugue pairs. Bach’s preludes themselves are varied—some resemble Baroque dances, others are two- or three-part contrapuntal works akin to his Inventions and Sinfonias. He also wrote preludes to introduce each of his English Suites.

*The Well-Tempered Clavier* influenced many later composers, some of whom wrote preludes in sets of 12 or 24, often aiming to use all major and minor keys as Bach did. Frédéric Chopin’s set of 24 preludes, Op. 28, often in simple ternary form, freed the prelude from its introductory role and made it an independent concert piece. While earlier pianist-composers like Muzio Clementi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Ignaz Moscheles had published prelude collections for pianists unskilled at improvisation, Chopin’s set revived the genre.

Chopin’s model inspired other collections of 24 or 25 piano preludes in major and minor keys by composers including Charles-Valentin Alkan, Ferruccio Busoni, César Cui, Stephen Heller, and Alexander Scriabin. Claude Debussy wrote two books of impressionistic piano preludes, unusually carrying descriptive titles. Chopin’s idea of the prelude as an unattached character piece expressing a mood rather than a specific program continued into the 20th century with works by George Antheil, George Gershwin, Alberto Ginastera, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Bohuslav Martinů, Olivier Messiaen, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.