There was a reason for naming that black, rustic beast Frederyck.
His ivory fangs - fierce, but endearing
In rage, in inquiry
Pounding his chest
For these sorrowful eyes
to put on the front of not rain, or dim light
Frederyck drank those tears of rage
Where I locked myself in his cage
A prison made of traditional honor
My fragile flesh
Anticipated only to be torn
But dear beast growled under my violent bitterness
Took my fears of abandonment and doubt
I, a hopeless cub
How my fingers caressed his form, trembling under his breath
He finally speaking -
A tender barcarolle granting me trills of serene, melodic phrase
Two heartless beasts
He, so furiously calm in my rage
I, enwrapped within his thickest, dark fur
And his claws, for us, to dig our deep Utopian grave.
"Beginning in D-Flat Major, this piece focuses on inner confliction and the contemplation of the solitary self. The composition was born from the mind of Frédéric Chopin in 1858 during his stay at the Valldemossa monastery. Amantine Dupin once commented, "It casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left [Chopin] in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at our "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguishing the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy. While playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself, he saw himself drown in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might—and he was right to—against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky."
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