The Ballade Without Words

Paris in the 1830s, when Chopin handed the storytelling to a piano alone

Related

RomanticBalladeCharacter PieceProgram Music

In the mid-1830s Chopin borrowed the word ballade from the sung narrative and gave it to the piano. There is no text, yet a story is expected.

Time and place

Paris, between 1831 and 1842. Chopin wrote four piano ballades, the first completed in 1835 and published the next year in Paris and Leipzig, the fourth published in 1842. Before that, a ballade meant a sung folk narrative, and Schubert used the form for ghost stories and legends.

What happened

Chopin kept the storytelling posture of the ballad but removed the words. A theme appears, is transformed, split and reassembled, and returns at the end in a new shape. The form does not follow sonata pattern but moves freely among variation, rondo and three-part design. The coda of the First turns the opening's gentle tune into a fierce declamation; the Fourth pushes one motive through many keys before returning home. Chopin left no explicit literary programme, and his link with Mickiewicz comes from Schumann and later writers, which belongs to reception rather than to the composer's instructions. Each lasts about ten minutes, held together by changes of speed, texture and key.

What changed

Instrumental music gained the right to narrate without a title or a text. The ballade became an independent piano genre, taken up by Liszt, Brahms, Grieg and Faure. Players were asked to handle characters and plot, changing the personality of one theme across sections rather than merely decorating it.

Listen for the turn

Begin with the opening and coda of the First, one melody turning from soft to fierce. Then the Second, where fast and slow characters alternate like a dialogue. Finally the coda of the Fourth, its materials rearranged in the last minutes. All four are piano recordings; notice how much the theme has changed each time it returns.

Related

This turn belongs to Romantic; the genre is at Ballade, next to Character Piece and part of the argument about Program Music.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Ballade" — Chopin's four ballades and their dates checked, not quoted
• Jim Samson, Chopin (Oxford University Press, 1996) — the literary programme question checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.