Listen to the following piece by Frédéric Chopin and comment on its key features. Your answer should consider texture, tonality, melody, and rhythm.

[The piece played is Chopin's Prelude no. 2 in A minor, op. 28]This piece for the piano begins with the left hand alone in a rhythmic ostinato figure. The use chromaticism makes this opening tonally ambiguous, and this ambiguity is not resolved until the end, where there is a perfect cadence in a minor key. The melody is in the right hand throughout, offering restatements of the same phrase, each time developed in new but inconclusive directions, a feeling intensified by the performer's use of rubato. This, along with the soft dynamics, relentless ostinato, and tonal ambiguity, lends this piece a sombre, searching character. Even the resolution of the final perfect cadence doesn't bring total closure - it answers a question that hasn't really been asked.