La fileuse : op. 157, no. 2

The Spinner, by far the best known of Joachim Raff's piano pieces, a perpetual-motion study in which continuous rapid figuration imitates a spinning wheel while a melody emerges from within it. Raff's fall from favour is among the steepest in musical history. In the 1870s and 1880s he was ranked by many critics among the greatest living composers, and within a generation of his death in 1882 his enormous output had vanished almost entirely from concert programmes.