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Prelude in C minor, Op. 28 No. 20

F. Chopin

By Mayank Sanganeria

In C minor, this piece is 30 chord changes across 13 bars under the notes on the page — a beginner-tier piece by our difficulty audit, 1 of 97 in the library, ranked easiest to hardest. Reduced to block chords, that's a progression you can learn in a sitting; the piece you're reading is that progression wearing figuration.

Practice this piece → Practice chords → Learn it section by section → Hear the harmony → Sight-read something new →

What's inside the harmony

Reducing the piece to block chords and labeling every change turns up harmonic phenomena that are easy to miss reading the figuration straight — each one below is also its own corpus-wide census.

• Secondary dominants 4× bar 2: V7/VI · bar 3: V7/iv · bar 6: V7/v (A)
• Color chords 1× bar 1: III+7 (G)
• Neapolitan chords 3× bar 2: bII · bar 8: bII7 · bar 12: bII7
• Chord inversions 12× bar 1: III+7 (G) (first inversion, bass G1) · bar 4: V7 (D) (second inversion, bass D1) · bar 5: VI7 (C) (first inversion, bass C2)
• Seventh chords 15× bar 1: iv7 — F-minor seventh chord · bar 2: V7/VI — Eb-dominant seventh chord · bar 3: V7 — G-dominant seventh chord

Free scores

• Blocked-chord reduction (MusicXML) — the harmony skeleton the player performs
• The piece as written (compressed MusicXML)