Perhaps here, or in the following years, Rachmaninoff decided to emulate the great composers before him. Between 19, he composed ten more preludes, none of which were, perhaps incidentally, in C-sharp minor, and published as the Ten Preludes, op. >In order of composition, Rachmaninoff’s collection of twenty-four preludes began with the Prelude in C-sharp minor, the second piece of his Morceaux de fantaise, op. Of the 20 th century composers, Rachmaninoff’s twenty-four preludes and Shostakovich’s opus 87 are the two most worthy to be named with Bach’s great “Forty-eight.” While the Chopin, Alkan, Scriabin and Shostakovich all set out with the purpose of providing a prelude (or étude) in each of the major and minor keys, and Shostakovich followed Bach’s example even more closely by composing complimentary fugues, Rachmaninoff, however, did not, and the idea of doing so seems to have occurred to him only after a majority of them had been composed. Even two centuries after the composition of the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier (give or take a few decades) they still held sway over composers’ imaginations. Others followed in his footsteps-throughout the 19 th century, most notably Frédéric Chopin, Charles-Valentin Alkan, and Alexander Scriabin. Though he was not the first to compose a collection pieces traversing the twenty-four major and minor keys, Johann Sebastian Bach certainly established the precedent and standard by which all other would be judged, and simultaneously offered the pianist a plentiful source of exercise and the composer a manual of composition and a point of origin for inspiration.
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