Prelude, Op. 28, No. 4 (Chopin)

The Prelude Op. 28, No. 4 by Frédéric Chopin is one of the 24 Chopin preludes. By Chopin's request, this piece was played at his own funeral, along with Mozart's "Requiem".
The piece is only a page long and uses a descending melody line. The melody starts with the dominant B and works its way to the tonic E, but halfway through the piece the descending line is interrupted and the melody starts over again. Only in the last bars does the melody dissolve in the tonic and go through a chord progression to the soothing and satisfying E minor chord.
Name.
Hans von Bülow called the prelude "suffocation", due to its sense of despair. In fact, Chopin's last dynamic marking in the piece is "smorzando", which means "dying away". But the prelude may have once been given a title. According to George Sand's daughter Solange, who stayed with the composer at the monastery in Mallorca when the preludes were written, "My mother gave a title to each of Chopin’s wonderful Preludes; these titles have been preserved on a score he gave to us." That titled score is lost. But Solange did record the names of the preludes, apparently without assigning the names to the prelude numbers. It is believed that the title "Quelles larmes au fond du cloître humide?" ("What tears [are shed] from the depths of the damp monastery?") corresponds to Prelude No. 4.