Prometheus: Prelude to a Nightmare

“Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

– Frederic Chopin

As the adrenaline is still pumping, as the denouement fades to black, we are met by the gentle, rhythmic tip tapping of Chopin’s Prelude, Op 28, No. 15, and we are left jarred by the contrast, questioning the intent behind such a welcome but unexpected artistic choice.

What is the significance of this wonderful piece of music? Its calm, pleasant tone doesn’t appear to fit the overall feeling we get from Prometheus. Is it out of place? Or does it tell us something? Well, Chopin could be giving us clues about plot or theme – he could be commenting on the nature of the human mind – or it could simply be an attempt to steady our heart rate after a sensory overload. I’m certain it’s each of those things, since it is a rich, layered composition with a telling story of its own. Although all art originates from deep within the artist’s subconscious mind, Prelude No. 15 is a rare specimen, since we can be quite sure of the source, of its inspiration.

Chopin was suffering from tuberculosis and taking refuge from a miserable Paris winter on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, with his lover, George Sand and her children. A short journey across the island had turned into an odyssey for the mother and her child as an uncharacteristic storm hampered their journey; the composer was alone, at home, and beginning to worry that they might not return. According to Ms Sand, the composition was the product of a nightmare that Chopin had experienced during this stressful time and the sound of the rain, falling rhythmically upon his roof, had infected his thoughts.

“It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamour of laughing children under the window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at our “encampment.” The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one [Chopin] would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, “Ah, I was sure that you were dead.” When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water, indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky.”

– George Sand

Since it was created under such conditions, with a repeated note appearing throughout, this Prelude is affectionately known as the Raindrop Prelude, or Raindrops. Both beautiful and haunting, poetic and affecting, melancholic in parts, even angry for a short while, it perfectly captures the artist’s state of mind at the time. A soft, gentle opening, that is replayed at the close, frames a dark, dramatic mid-section. Chopin softly doses, then rises into a dark dream state – we feel his pain, we sense his anxiety – before resting peacefully once more.

It’s the absence of this tempestuous middle section within Prometheus that I find most intriguing. The first part of the main theme begins when Shaw’s dream is interrupted by David. It continues while we observe vignettes of the android as he occupies himself ‘alone’ aboard the Prometheus, and only ends once the on-board computer declares “destination threshold”. We have to wait for the final bars of the masterpiece, which are only heard once the blood curdling scream of the recently hatched xenomorph eventually fades into the blackness preceding the credits. The heavy, stirring mid-section of the composition – the dark, chaotic, affecting nightmare that Chopin so eloquently captures in C-sharp minor – is never heard during the film. It is, instead, substituted by the ordeal we vicariously experience during the ill-fated mission undertaken by the Prometheus crew. This is intentional. We are Chopin, drifting off to feint, gentle sounds, only to have our slumber intruded upon by a deafening tempest. And then, when the storm ends, we are delivered to the tranquillity from whence we came.

Is the decent to LV223, and all the horror that occurs there, somebody’s horrible nightmare? For Chopin, a soothing daydream quickly turned sour and the heavy rainfall led to imagined drowning, death and the loss of that which was most precious to him. But, as harrowing as these thoughts were, they were just thoughts. No ill came to any of the characters who were imagined to be under threat. Is it at all possible that the scenes framed by Chopin’s Raindrops are just the product of a character’s subconscious?

Well, yes, it is possible, but it would seriously undermine the integrity of the film. The nightmare, to me, is not literal; nobody is sleeping. The horror is just so incredible that the characters wish it were all a dream. The events unfolding are authentic, within the fictional reality of Prometheus. Giger’s nightmarish ideas have haunted this universe since it (chest) burst onto the scene in 1979. This world has been real now for over 30 years and I don’t think Ridley Scott wants us to wake up just yet.

Could it be possible that Scott believes this music has the power to invoke a dream-like state? Perhaps the irrational nature of its creation, encoded within its notes, casts a spell that might help us suspend our disbelief? I doubt it, but it is an entrancing piece that perfectly mimics the slow, melodic drift into sleep. It certainly doesn’t discourage a hypnotic state.

All of the above warrant its use, but I think there’s something deeper to be found here. Something to support the argument being put forward by Prometheus. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of Chopin’s composition, I believe that it has been selected to serve a higher purpose.

The music is a subconscious translation of the mesmerism of a Balearic storm; an involuntary reaction to its rhythm; the tapping of feet to unnoticed percussion. As he daydreams, Chopin is unaware that the music is not emanating from within, but from without. It’s not the product of free-will, but of external ‘programming’. His thoughts are being given to him.

And, as is often the case, this illusion of free will is encouraged by the ego. Chopin is horrified at the suggestion from George Sand that he has subconsciously imitated the pattern of the rainfall upon the roof. Of course, that could not have been the case, the implication is no good for the ‘soul’. It’s a masterpiece, of that there’s no doubt, but to ensure a sense of achievement, Chopin insists the work is the result of his own creative abilities. Attributing its creation to the weather outside would diminish his own genius and render him nothing more than an instrument of nature.

“Vanity is the quicksand of reason.”

– George Sand

The conclusion to be drawn is, therefore, that the director wishes to frame the dark discovery made by the Prometheus expedition as a nightmare. A nightmare inspired by the twisted art of Giger as it brings to life an evocative vision of how the myths of our ancient ancestors might have played out in the Alien universe. It’s a comment on the invariably unrecognised inspiration for human thought. Whether or not he would ever admit it, Chopin’s beautiful prelude speaks to us about how it is our thoughts emerge from the depths of our subconscious. Inspiration, as with all things, is at the mercy of the fundamental laws of the universe. Inspiration, like all thought, is the consequence of a cause not of its own making. Only supernatural forces have the power to create ex nihilo. All thought, and all existence, is the reverberation of a fundamental first cause; the truth. The Logos.

“Art for the sake of art itself is an idle sentence. Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good — that is the creed I seek.”

– George Sand

Chopin ‘chose to believe’ that he was in control of the music, when in fact, the music of nature was in full control of him.