October Free Sheet Music: Chopin’s Prelude 20

📷 by Ehud Neuhaus

A thousand pardons for my late posting this month. I have been on a long working/vacation, and wasn’t able to post my music remotely. I hope that Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 was worth your wait! It’s the perfect spooky music for Halloween, and at only 🦇13🦇 measures you’ll have time to learn it before the zombies💀 rise!

You might remember this prelude as the opening to Barry Manilow’s Could It Be Magic, and it was Rachmaninoff’s inspiration for his Variations on a Theme of Chopin. It is beautiful and dark, and fun to play!

Chopin wrote his Prelude No. 20 in the key of C minor. I transposed it to A minor and deleted some of the less influential notes to help it fit under your fingers more easily. You can print my arrangement here:

Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 (simplified)

Demonstration of Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 simplified

You can print Chopin’s original sheet music for Prelude No. 20 in C minor here:

I hope you are enjoying Autumn wherever you are! I have been learning more about helping my students to overcome obstacles to joyful music making. I will be sharing more about that in future posts. For now, be sure to print the sheet music for We Gather Together on my FREE SHEET MUSIC page before it disappears on October 31st! We Gather Together is a classic Thanksgiving hymn about gratitude that you might want to play for your family celebration.

Hope your Halloween’s a scream! With love and music, Gaili

10 Replies to “October Free Sheet Music: Chopin’s Prelude 20”

  1. Thank you for making this music easier to play for my (more advanced) students. But to read it is a nightmare for them… Wouldn’t it be better to write it one octave higher than in your version? Or a fifth? Of course with the instruction to play it an octave/fifth lower.

    1. Hi Joost, raising made other notes a nightmare. In the original, the clefs change in the right hand which is also a nightmare! I chose the lesser nightmare, I think. So I encourage students to write in the low ledger line notes in with pencil until they get comfortable reading those notes. It was a difficult choice, but it seems the best solution. Sorry! Happy Holidays and thanks for your comment – Gaili

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