A prelude (from the Latin for “play-before”) began as an organist's improvisation at the opening of a service — warming up the fingers, checking the instrument, tuning the listener's ear.
Bach raised the prelude to an art form in the Well-Tempered Clavier (48 preludes and fugues). Chopin composed 24 preludes as self-sufficient miniatures (one of the best known is No. 15 in D-flat major, the “Raindrop”; Chopin finished the cycle on Mallorca). Debussy painted sonic pictures in his preludes: The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, Footprints in the Snow, The Submerged Cathedral. The Ukrainian composer Skoryk wrote a cycle of 24 preludes — a grand homage to this tradition.
