Ballade (ii).

A term applied to an instrumental (normally piano) piece in a narrative style. It was first used by Chopin (Ballade in G minor op.23, published in 1836 but begun in 1831). He composed four ballades, whose common features are compound metre (6/4 or 6/8) and a structure that is based on thematic metamorphosis governed not so much by formal musical procedures as by a programmatic or literary intention. Full of melodic beauty, harmonic richness and powerful climaxes, they are among his finest achievements. They were said to have been inspired by the ballad poetry of his compatriot Adam Mickiewicz, particularly by his Switeź and Switezianka, poems concerning a lake near Nowogródek and a nymph of the lake; but Chopin himself provided no evidence whatever for that belief and probably had no specific ballad or story in mind.

Franck’s Ballade op.9 (1844) and Liszt’s in D (1845–8) and B minor (1853) follow Chopin’s in not being associated with particular literary sources. The earliest such association is in the first of Brahms’s Four Ballades op.10 (1854), which bears the heading ‘After the Scottish ballad “Edward” in Herder’s “Stimmen der Völker”’ (Herder’s translation of Edward had previously been set to music by Loewe and Schubert); but, as Mies suggested, Brahms may have originally planned it as a vocal work in strophic form and converted it into a piano piece while he composed it. Brahms’s ballades, attractive examples of his early manner, are distinguishable from Chopin’s by their clearer form – usually three-part song form. A strophic form, that most naturally implied by the literary ballad, underlies Grieg’s Ballade in Form von Variationen über eine norwegische Melodie op.24 (1875–6).

Although instrumental ballades are usually for the piano, among those for other media are Vieuxtemps’ Ballade and Polonaise op.38 (c1860), for violin with orchestra or piano, Fauré’s Ballade op.19 (1881), for piano and orchestra, and several examples, both chamber and orchestral, by Frank Martin. Orchestral ballades (some designated ‘ballad’) have usually been inspired by literary sources, often well-known poems, for example Dukas’ L’apprenti sorcier (based on Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling), Somervell’s Helen of Kirkconnell and MacCunn’s The Ship o’ the Fiend. With the orchestral ballade in particular, the distinction between the ballade and its related forms, the rhapsody and the symphonic poem, appears slight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Mies: ‘Herders Edvard-Ballade bei Joh. Brahms’, ZMw, ii (1919–20), 225–32

G. Axel: Die Klavier-Ballade (diss., U. of Vienna, 1934)

C. Engelbrecht: ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der Chopinschen Klavierballade’, Chopin Congress: Warsaw 1960, 519–21

G. Wagner: Die Klavierballade um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1976)

P.V. Turrill: The Piano Ballade in the Romantic Era (diss., U. of Southern California, 1977)

D. Witten: ‘Ballads and Ballades’, Piano Quarterly, xxix/1 (1981), 33–7

J. Parakilas: Ballads without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Portland, OR, 1992)

MAURICE J.E. BROWN