It begins with a bold, ascending musical announcement which falls back and dissolves into shadowy harmonic ambiguity. The lilting meters of 6/8 and 6/4 (in the first Ballade) are a common thread, suggesting the kind of narrative song we hear in this example by Schubert. ![]() Each of the four works inhabits a slightly different musical landscape. The epitome of Romanticism, they take us on a deep, hallucinatory inner journey. Unfolding as wordless poetic dramas, they inhabit the world of atmosphere and dreams. While Chopin’s four Ballades are filled with a sense of narrative, they do not tell stories in the literal sense. As with Chopin, Mickiewicz fled political upheaval in Poland and emigrated to Paris. ![]() In his Henle forward, the musicologist Norbert Müllemann defined the folk ballade as “a strophically-constructed poem that described a dramatic, often also a demonic or mystical scenario within a comparatively restricted frame.” Robert Schumann suggested that Chopin was influenced by the work of the Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz. In the early nineteenth century, the title carried literary connotations. The solo piano Ballade originated with Frédéric Chopin.
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