Bortkiewicz: Prelude Op. 33 No. 10 "Patetico"

About the piece.

The ten Preludes Op. 33 were published by D. Rahter in Leipzig in 1926. Bortkiewicz had lost his home in Kharkiv to war and revolution, settled in Vienna in the early 1920s and became an Austrian citizen around the time the set appeared. Stephen Coombs, who recorded the preludes for Hyperion, calls these years the time of the greatest security in his life.

No. 10 is the last prelude of the set. It is in B-flat minor, and “Patetico” is the only marking it carries. At around a minute and a half it is one of the shortest of the ten, and it works as a finale: the right hand carries a melody in full chords, where the top note has to sing, while the left hand moves in wide leaps without a break. Reviewers hear Rachmaninoff in the set as a whole. In this prelude, pianists who have played it tend to hear Tchaikovsky.

The set found an audience in Vienna early on. The pianist Paul de Conne played No. 8 regularly at his Sunday concerts in the late 1920s. After that it was mostly forgotten until the 1990s, when Cyprien Katsaris made the first recording of it, followed by Stephen Coombs, Klaas Trapman, Jouni Somero and others. The recorded timings for No. 10 range from 1:20 to 1:37.

Learn it at your own speed.

This tutorial was made with LumaKeys, a Mac app for learning piano from falling notes. Open a MIDI file of the piece, or transcribe a piano recording you have, then slow it down, loop the hard bars and practise one hand at a time. The download is free.