Something a little calmer today, the first of Rachmaninov’s Morceaux de fantaisie (the second one of the set is the very famous C# minor Prelude). I was in two minds about whether this counts as a happy piece, but I love it very much. It’s Rachmaninov’s birthday today and I’ve spent my afternoon trying to resurrect my Russian by reading a bit of Pushkin, so this piece seems fitting. It’s a wistful sort of happiness, the dream of an elegant world that has been long destroyed, if it ever even existed.