The Ballad
The F minor Ballade, held up as the supreme achievement in the genre, through its references to tradition and its signposts for future generations of composers, through its objectivism of means and at the same time its highly personal mode of utterance, becomes the quintessence of syncretism, a sort of symbol of the Romantic perception of the world, and at the same time a timeless message, understood and creatively interpreted to this day.
.‘a tale, spun out of events of everyday life or chivalrous deeds, usually enlivened with strangeness from the romantic world, sung in a melancholy tone, serious in style, simple and natural in its words’.1 One could hardly wish for a better and more concise profile of the genre than these words of Adam Mickiewicz noted in his preface to Ballady i romanse [Ballads and Romances] – a volume of poetry, the publication of which, in 1822, is regarded as the symbolic beginning of Polish romanticism.
Mickiewicz turned to the ballad genre in a new, Romantic, form, quite deliberately, thereby subscribing to the current established by such giants of the pen as Bürger, Schiller and Goethe. But the new ballad was also tempting with what fascinated young writers most of all: an air of mystery, the interpenetration of real and make-believe worlds, a folkloric element, with distinctive characters, a simplified plot, conflicts full of drama and a syncretism of the epic, the lyric and the dramatic, as well as distinctive images and… music. Reference to thirteenth-century prototypes reinforced the cultural context through associations with now overgrown monuments of human notions and attitudes with the character of topoi, with a traditional morality and worldview.
It was in the aura of romanticism as thus understood that Fryderyk Chopin grew up in Warsaw, surrounded not only by good composers (with Elsner to the fore), thriving sheet music publishers and piano makers, and also a flourishing opera house, but also new-wave poets, such as Witwicki and Odyniec. Already as a child he was known to be fond of improvising epic scenes on the piano. Particularly in front of a small group of friends – the scions of noble houses boarding with his father – he would organise sessions during which a flair for narration and growing pianistic ability were entwined with a playful sense of humour and youthful exuberance.
That epic aspect would become so important in Chopin’s oeuvre that when he departed from the Classical and brillante models that inform his early Warsaw compositions (particularly with orchestra), he would turn to the genre of the ballad, being the first to create a variety completely devoid of words. It would seem that his ballades, besides a natural anchoring in the cultural context that surrounded the young Chopin, were also a response to the pressure – faced with the demise of the November Uprising and the catastrophe of Polish statehood – to write patriotic operas. On reaching Paris in 1831, after months of ‘thundering at the piano’2 on lonely nights in Vienna, Chopin was sufficiently mature and self-conscious that he was perfectly capable of differentiating between his fascination with opera and female opera singers, his inclinations for writing narrative forms filled with an emotional element and his ability to translate tales into sounds, from his professional compositional preferences. He knew that by means of the universal language of music he would convey more substance – and more profoundly, more broadly, to boot.
It is likely that by then he had already sketched outlines of both the first Ballade and the first Scherzo – another Romantic genre that he essentially forged anew, taking Beethoven’s concept of a dramatic ‘musical joke’ (scherzo liter- ally means ‘joke’) to an almost diabolical extreme of contrasts. He knew that his strength lay in exploring the piano, as a sort of musical cosmos that already offered him the possibility of imitating not just the lyricism and drama of the human voice, but also the whole orchestra. He knew that his sensitivity and way of hearing predisposed him for synthesis and sublimation, for a certain economy of utterance and universalisation of musical language. And in this context, just as the literary ballad was to a degree an equivalent of drama, so Chopin’s ballade was an equivalent of opera. In both cases, conciseness went hand-in-hand with distinctness, and the emotional power was reinforced by the clarity of the message.
Chopin’s ballades
.It seems no accident that Chopin – so reluctant to make any confessions concerning the origins of his works – mentioned Mickiewicz’s ballads as an inspiration for his own, during a visit to Robert Schumann, in 1836, shortly before the publication of his first of four works in the genre: the Ballade in G minor. Schumann recorded another detail of that visit: this composition was particularly close both to Chopin and to him, and let us not forget that it was Schumann who revealed to the world the genius of his Warsaw contemporary and was perfectly familiar with his successive opuses, though with time he would find the Pole’s individual and at the same time revolutionary path of musical change increasingly difficult to comprehend. Yet the ballades aroused great enthusiasm in him. When he became the dedicatee of the second – in the key of F major – he noted: ‘a poet could easily find words for this music; it moves one to the very core’.3
Chopin not only decided to forgo any text, which since the Middle Ages had been so closely integrated with the genre of the musical ballad that publishers in Germany and Great Britain, when announcing his new works, explained that they would be ballads without words. As was his wont, he also refused to give them any programme titles that might suggest their connection with specific literary works. It would seem, therefore, that the Mickiewiczian inspirations mentioned to Schumann were of a general character, concerning a particular aura, a type of narrative or a distinctiveness of dramatic structure. Although attempts have been made to match particular Chopin’s ballades with poems by Mickiewicz, they have been accepted by neither musicologists nor music lovers. Only the musical structure of the F major Ballade, with its two themes extremely different from one another from the very beginning, its unusual disposition of keys (the second theme, of a ‘wildly’ dramatic character, is in the key of A minor, which stands at odd with convention) and the innovative conclusion of the work in the key of the second theme (instead of the principal key) shows analogies with the structure of Mickiewicz’s ballad Świteź, but those analogies seem to be of a sufficiently general nature that it would be hard to defend the thesis of the conscious depiction of the text in music.
The literary ballad, thanks to its rhythmic regularity, melodiousness and formal structuring, e.g. the presence of refrains, is one of the most ‘musical’ genres, even if it is devoid of music in the strict sense. Chopin, meanwhile, incorporates into his ballades a number of features of language, both in the way he shapes the material (in its rhythmic traits) and in the emotional distinctness. Each of his four ballades has a slightly different design and dramatic structure; in each of them, the musical material is shaped in a different way. Yet in each, the greatest climax appears only in the closing bars. This is not a typical dramatic structure to musical compositions at that time; as a rule, the main climax occurred at the golden divide of the form, or thereabouts, and the last phase in a composition was designed to resolve the conflicts (including reconciling the keys of the themes with the principal key) and quell the emotions. For this reason, commentators often point to the arching features of Classical musical forms. In Chopin’s ballades, the gravitation towards the climax at the very end of the work – despite the fluctuating tensions that have gone before – is so characteristic that one sometimes encounters the term ‘balladic form’ for just such a type of shaping to a musical composition.
Particularly crucial is the fact that in each of his ballades, the themes undergo transformations that alter their character, which is one of the most powerful means of musical narration in instrumental works. Listeners have a tendency to subjectivise musical ideas, and when a theme alters its character, it is animated, in a way, or even personified, with the result that its transformations are seen as changes to the very form, creating a sort of story. The working of musical themes has a very long tradition; it was explored in particularly during the Baroque, in so-called ostinato variations, in which a fixed formula in the bass part, repeated many times, was accompanied by increasingly bold, and not infrequently improvised, arrangements of the melody. Yet those changes were aimed mainly at showing the possibilities of the instrument and the art of the performer; they explored hand positions and effects that could be obtained, and changes of character were rather a corollary of the musical changes that occurred. In the Romantic era, composers began exploring the possibility of transforming the character of a theme for expressive purposes, as a way of for- ging the musical narrative, and Chopin, in his ballades, became one of the precursors of that current. Already in the Ballade in G minor, the initially calm, almost indifferent first theme over time acquires dramatic, even tragic, features, and the incredibly cantilena second theme is transformed into a sort of apotheosis. Such transformation to the second theme become a characteristic feature of Chopin’s balladic forms, although in the F major Ballade, the second theme absorbs the first, as it were, which may be a metaphorical parallel of the flooding of an undefended city by the waters of a lake in the face of the barbarian invasion by Russian forces. Yet regardless of the possible literary connotations, such transformations embedded in a musical form lend it narrative features and increase the suggestiveness of the artistic utterance without the use of words.
Another crucial procedure that distinguishes Chopin’s ballades is the way the musical material is organised and accentuated. Above all, the composer employs compound metres (6/8 or 6/4), which render his themes similar to song rhythms. Not by chance is Karpiński’s idyll ‘Laura i Filon’ [Laura and Philo] (‘Już miesiąc zeszedł, psy się uśpiły / I coś tam klaszcze za borem’ (‘The moon now has risen, the dogs are asleep / and there’s a clapping beyond yonder wood’)) in 6/8, which is how Chopin wrote it into his youthful potpourri the Fantasy on Polish Airs. The poem employs a ‘Stanislavian’ strophe (with an alternating arrangement of syllables 10 + 8), which Mickiewicz also used in his ballads, including in one of the best-known ones, ‘Świtezianka’ [The Świtezianka] (‘Jakiż to chłopiec piękny i młody? | Jaka to obok dziewica?’ (‘Who might be that boy, so lovely and fresh? / And who is that girl by his side?’)) and in the romance ‘Dudarz’ [The minstrel]. In Mickiewicz we also find an expanded variant of this strophe (11 + 8, including in the ballads ‘Świteź ’ and ‘Powrót taty’ [Papa’s return]. These similarities indicate the close relationship between the chosen musical metre and the texts of literary ballads. This metre allows notes to be grouped on many levels and shaped after the fashion of syllables, words, lines and strophes in a poem, and the number of units in the bar makes it possible to arrange the text in such a way that one musical period is equal to one strophe. Another metrical procedure is the use of such basic feet as the iamb and the trochee, which appear in key themes in all of Chopin’s ballades, not infrequently determining their musical essence, as in the first theme of the F major Ballade and the second theme of the A flat major, where the melody appears gradually, after the regular rhythms on the same notes have died away. This may be understood as a sort of archaisation of the musical utterance, although in the purely musical layer, especially in the harmony, the composer sets the course in his ballades for the Romantic avantgarde. Above all, however, he assimilates the rhythm of the music to the rhythm of speech. A third procedure is a melodic shaping that suggests a question and an answer, as in the principal theme of the G minor Ballade. The identical beginning of many of the phrases is also a kind of anaphora, additionally bringing the course of the music close to the design of a poem. Finally, from a broader perspective, Chopin seems to blur the symmetry, maintain the flow of the utterance and mould the material in such a way as to create the impression of a flowing narrative. And this combination – of a certain regularity on the micro level and at the same time an unbroken continuity on the macro level – seems to be the most masterful structural achievement in the forging of these tales without words.
These procedures are accompanied by a remarkably sculptural shaping of emotions through the music. All attempts at describing Chopin’s ballades without the use of terms with a strong emotional colouring leave one with the impression of losing their essence. Those emotions, shaped in an incredibly suggestive way, penetrating one another, transforming and colliding, ultimately always leading to some conflict and final eruption, become the most important layer to the narrative of Chopin’s ballades, common to and deeply identified with their literary prototype.
The Ballade in F minor
.All of the above-mentioned features of the genre are possessed by the fourth Ballade in F minor, Op. 52, composed in 1842 at Nohant, in the only true home from home that was made for him on her country estate by George Sand, where, following the health crisis on Majorca and a brush with death, Chopin wrote his most precious masterworks. This is his last ballade, although he clearly refers back to the genre in the Barcarolle in F sharp major (1845), which crowns this period in his oeuvre. The F minor Ballade is marked by an even deeper seam of archaism than his other works in the genre: its main theme, in what might be termed its oscillation of spheres, displays features of Bachian themes, and Baroque polyphony seems to harmonise in masterful fashion with Classical variation work, since the form of the composition synthesises the above-mentioned dramaturgical tendencies with the form of variations and an arching contour suggesting the influence of Classical sonata form. The main theme is subjected to variations, and their gradual thickening of the musical fabric draws the listener into an increasingly moving, but at the same time mysterious, world. But – as in the other ballades – it is the second, initially hymnic, theme, transformed into a sort of apotheosis, that becomes the goal of all the gradually accumulated aspirations. However, that apotheosis does not end the work, and the music that follows it is without precedence even in the oeuvre of Chopin. Linked to the material of the themes merely by allusion, it is the absolute pinnacle of some highly dramatic personal utterance. To quote Mieczysław Tomaszewski: ‘at the balladic narrative’s point of climax, it is impossible to find the right words. This explosion of feeling and passion, expressed through rocking passages and chords suffused with harmonic substance, is simply unparalleled. […] We have before us supremely powerful expression without a trace of emphasis or pathos’.4
The manuscript of the Ballade in F minor displayed in this exhibition is a remarkable source, as it offers us insight into Chopin’s creative process, which in most cases, due to the scant number of extant sketches, can only be the object of more or less reliable speculation. It contains the first version of the work in a form intended for publication, but ultimately withdrawn. This is an exceptional situ- ation, as the composer generally sought to use even heavily revised manuscripts, sending them to his French publisher, who would then send back the proofs for correction. In the case of this Ballade, however, probably after completing the whole work, Chopin decided to alter the metre from 6/4 to 6/8, which made it impossible to use this manuscript, since all of the note values would have had to be reduced by half. Thus he started work all over again, despite his well-known aversion to writing out music, keeping the presented manuscript among his papers till he died. The original metre may suggest an allusion to his first Ballade in G minor, which is the only one in 6/4, complemented by such features as the minor key (the second and third ballades are in major keys) and the concept of adding an expansive dramatic ending after the last transformation of the main themes. Yet, in the final stage of revision, the composer was probably concerned that with musical material shaped in this way, interpretations might become too static. The change from the crotchet-based metre into a quaver one does not mean that this work should be played twice as quickly. Musical tempo, besides rhythmic value, is also clarified by the composer’s remarks in words, or even with a metronome marking; besides this, there are certain conventions relating to the tempo of the music itself – in dances, for instance. The F minor Ballade was ultimately furnished with the expression Andante con moto, so at a moderate tempo (andante is walking pace), but with movement, so Chopin probably considered that writing in quavers would make it easier for pianists to grasp his idea of maintaining a certain momentum. The quavers beamed in threes, as the 6/8 metre is written, also refer in a way to the convention of notating melismata, so vocal passages in which several notes fall on a single syllable of text. All of these arguments suggest that he was so anxious to ensure that the pianist not lose that flowing character of the narrative which is a key feature of every ballade that he decided to rewrite the score.
After Chopin’s death, the manuscript was gifted by his sister, Ludwika Jędrzejewicz, to the Czech composer Josef Dessauer, who was among Chopin’s Paris friends (he dedicated to Dessauer the Polonaises, Op. 26). That is confirmed by a handwritten annotation made by Ludwika on the first page of the manuscript, probably in Paris, during the liquidation of her brother’s apartment at 12 Place Vendôme: ‘p[our] M[.] Des[s]auer’. It is highly likely that the manuscript was then complete or included a larger portion than the bifolio (four pages) with 79 bars which has survived to our times. The original autograph certainly did not finish where it ends today, because the music suddenly breaks off without any sign of the work being terminated. However, its perfect condition indicates it was carefully stored by Chopin, which makes it unlikely that the manuscript had become incomplete before his death. We have no information about the manu script until 1933, when it appeared, in its present state of preservation, at an auction in Lucerne. It was bought by the famous Austrian collector Rudolf Kallir and during the Second World War was taken away to New York, where it remained in the possession of Kallir’s heirs. In December 2024, the manuscript was bought by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, and it is one of the most precious objects in the collection of the Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw.
.The F minor Ballade, held up as the supreme achievement in the genre, through its references to tradition and its signposts for future generations of composers, through its objectivism of means and at the same time its highly personal mode of utterance, becomes the quintessence of syncretism, a sort of symbol of the Romantic perception of the world, and at the same time a timeless message, understood and creatively interpreted to this day. That is why the manuscript of the Ballade, together with the Fan with Caricatures by Auguste Charpentier and George Sand – an object that is radically different, reflecting, with humour, the composer’s social milieu – form the axis of the exhibition Romantic Life. Like the two masks of ancient theatre, they delineate the space between sacred and profane, spirit and matter, art and life. Distributed within that space are material manifestations of the work of outstanding artists who formed a kind of circle, at the centre of which lies a dematerialised space filled with the music of Fryderyk Chopin’s F minor Ballade.
[1] Adam Mickiewicz, Foreword to Poezye Adama Mickiewicza [Poems of Adam Mickiewicz] (Vilnius, 1822), i:XL.
[2] This was an expression used by Chopin in a letter to Jan Matuszyński of 26 December 1830.
[3] Robert Schumann, review of Two Nocturnes, Op. 37, Ballade in F major, Op. 38 and Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 42, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, November 2 (n° 36), 15/1841, 141–142.
[4] Mieczysław Tomaszewski, ‘Ballade in F minor, Op. 52’, from a series of broadcasts entitled Fryderyk Chopin’s Complete Works, Polish Radio 2; an edited version is published on the website of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, https://chopin.nifc.pl/en/chopin/kompozycja/115, accessed 17 Feb. 2025.
