Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works / For the Use of Teachers, Players, and Music Clubs

by Edward Baxter Perry

Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23

The first ballade, Op. 23, in G minor, was published in June, 1836, perhaps written a year or two earlier. It was suggested by and is founded upon one of the most able and forceful, as well as extended, patriotic historical poems by Mickiewicz, often called the Lithuanian Epic, entitled “Konrad Wallenrod,” and published in 1828. The following is a brief synopsis of its plot:

During the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Red Cross knights, a powerful religious, political, and military order, controlling large dominions on the Baltic, in territory now included in modern Russia, were at fierce feud with Lithuania, then an independent principality, later united with Poland by a marriage of its reigning prince, Jagiello, to the heiress of the Polish throne, thus founding the dynasty of the Jagiellos, the most illustrious of the royal houses of Poland. Long and desperate was the struggle. The Lithuanians, though vastly outnumbered and frequently outgeneraled and defeated, defended every inch of their beloved fatherland, now absorbed in western Russia, with heroic valor. At last their ruling prince and idolized leader fell in battle, their army was routed and cut to pieces, the scanty remnant taking refuge from their merciless pursuers among the fastnesses of the mountains; and the country was for a time practically subjugated and forced to submit to the most cruel and tyrannical oppression. The conquerors, being Crusaders and Christian knights, considered every species of atrocious spoliation and barbaric violence, when practised against the infidel Lithuanians, as justifiable, even laudable, and for some years the sufferings of the conquered knew no limit.

Among the prisoners taken and carried into virtual slavery by the Teutonic Order, was the little seven-year-old son of the fallen prince—a bright, precocious, winsome lad, who, after serving for some time as page in the household of the grand master of the Order, so completely won the heart of the old knight, that he adopted the boy and educated him with his own children, in all the courtly and martial accomplishments of the time. Years passed. Young Konrad grew in manly power and promise, and came to be ranked among the flower of Teutonic chivalry, first in the tourney, first in the field, and first in the ladies’ hall. But ever at his side, as strange friend and secret counselor, was seen the somber figure of the aged Wajdelote, or bard, a venerable minstrel, who had come none knew whence, and, despite his proud and gloomy bearing, had won high favor at the court by the magic of his voice and lute. Ostensibly a wandering singer, he was in reality a Lithuanian noble of high degree, a former friend of Konrad’s father, the fallen prince, and stood high in the confidence of the Lithuanian people and nobility as an able, devoted patriot. He came as an emissary from them to find and win back their lost prince Konrad to his own true flag and his native land. They were still hoping and fitfully struggling to throw off the tyranny of the Red Cross knights and wanted Konrad for their leader.

Under the cloak of his minstrelsy, the Wajdelote plied this secret mission. With all the fiery eloquence of his poet’s genius, he wrought upon the spirit of the young man, rousing it to duty and action, to honor, ambition, and patriotism, to sympathy with the wrongs of his oppressed fellow-countrymen, to vengeance for the death of his slaughtered father, stirring its latent heroism, steeling it to steadfast purpose. And as his influence strengthened day by day, the open brow of the young prince grew clouded, the smile vanished from his lips, and his sunny eyes grew deeper and darker with stern resolve.

At last the occasion came. In a foray against a band of insurgent Lithuanians, Konrad and his mentor detached themselves from their companions, and feigning to be taken captive, joined the forces of their own countrymen, where they were welcomed with the wildest enthusiasm. The two years that followed were the happiest of Konrad’s life. He threw himself heart and soul into the fierce joy of combat for his native land, devoting to her service all his personal courage and ability, and all the military skill so carefully acquired at the court and camp of the Red Cross knights; yet found time in the brief pauses of activity to woo and win as wife the fairest and truest of the Lithuanian maids. For a time the pulses of his life throbbed with a full but fluctuating tide, in the swift interchange of love’s delights and the thrill of gallant deeds. Caressing whispers alternated with the clash of swords, and the tender light of the honeymoon with the lurid gleam of the camp-fire; but his happiness was destined to be as transient as his valor was vain. A sterner duty, a more self-sacrificing devotion claimed him, and his veteran mentor was still at his side to mature the plan and urge its execution. His beloved Lithuania, enfeebled, broken, disorganized for so long, was wholly unable to cope in open field with her powerful, disciplined, and well-equipped antagonist. Some daring, subtle, and far-sighted stratagem alone might save her; and such a one had formed itself in the mind of the old minstrel. Again his eloquence rang in the ears of Konrad, like the voice of fate, “Behold, this is to do! Thou art the man!”

A heart-breaking farewell to his bride, and Konrad disappears utterly from the scene for ten years; then returns irrecognizably altered in appearance, under an assumed name, with wealth and fame and following, acquired in wars with the Saracens of Spain. The old grand master of the Red Cross knights is dead, and Konrad with little difficulty secures his own election to that office; and then begins the work of vengeance. By his absolute power as grand master, and his cunning diplomacy, he involved the order in bitter internal dissensions, depleted its treasury, wasted its resources, weakened its garrisons, and in every possible way sapped its strength, and finally led the flower of its army to complete annihilation in a winter campaign against the Lithuanians, into whose snares and ambuscades the Red Cross knights were mercilessly thrown by secret and preconcerted arrangement with his countrymen.

Thus by a course of treachery, which for daring, subtlety, and sustained purpose, both in conception and execution, has hardly a parallel in history, was accomplished what could not have been done by force. The power of the order was effectually broken and Lithuania set free. But Konrad’s life, as well as his happiness, paid the price of his patriotism. His beloved bride he never saw but once again, and that only for a moment of agonized parting through dungeon bars, just before his execution. And it is said he never smiled from the hour when the voice of the stern old minstrel first stirred his heart with the trumpet call of inexorable duty, till the hour when its proud pulses were stilled forever by the daggers of the secret tribunal. For his identity was discovered; he was, of course, tried and condemned as a traitor to the order, and died in disgrace by the hands of his former comrades.

Such is the story, sad but stirring, which Mickiewicz handles in his poem, and which Chopin reëmbodied in the G minor ballade, not following literally its successive steps, but emphasizing to his utmost its spirit, character, and moral. I think no one ever played this composition, or listened to it attentively, without feeling that its mood was not of our day and land. The time it represents is the middle ages, its scene is laid in stern and rugged Lithuania, among warlike knights and resentful rebels, and its whole spirit is therefore medieval and military.

It opens with a brief but scornfully defiant introduction, a call to arms, reminding one of the first lines of that familiar address to the Roman gladiators: “Friends, I come not here to talk; ye all do know the story of our thraldom.” Then the first and principal theme enters, symbolizing the forceful personality and stern mentor voice of the old minstrel, in its somber yet resolute phrases, solemn, inflexible, relentless as fate; telling of wrongs to be avenged, of a nation in bondage awaiting its deliverer; of the imperative call of duty and patriotism; and it constantly recurs all through the composition as its leading motive, whenever, as is vividly suggested by the other contrasting, conflicting themes and passages, continually introduced, the young prince wavers in his purpose, deterred by doubts and forebodings, lured by seductive temptations from pursuance of the desperate and soul-trying venture; whenever his mind wanders, as it must at times, to regretful memories of happier days, to the splendors of feast and tournament, to the pomp and pride of a martial career under the adopted flag of the order, to the blithe hunting-horns of his gay companions in youth, and tender dreams of the first great love of his manhood, all sacrificed to a grand but pitiless cause. He is ever recalled to the heroic mood, to the proud but rugged path of duty, by this mentor voice—gravely insistent, quietly determined, which will not be gainsaid; and which finally triumphs over all other considerations. The impetuous presto which closes the work portrays the fierce excitement and fiery rush of conflict, the utter self-abandon that hurls itself jubilantly into the arms of an ignominious death for a cherished ideal; and it ends with the savage but triumphant shout of a blood-bought victory.

This ballade, though comparatively an early work, is one of Chopin’s most darkly grand and dramatically powerful efforts; and the subjective personal moods of the exiled Polish patriot are voiced in its gloomy indignation, its desperate courage, and its fierce defiance.

There is an undercurrent of political meaning in “Konrad Wallenrod,” which fortunately escaped the notice of the Russians, who allowed its publication at St. Petersburg, but which appeals to every native and friend of Poland and has had no small share in making its popularity. Lithuania in the fourteenth century, broken and crushed, represents Poland in the nineteenth, and the tyrannical Teutonic Order stands for Russian oppression. The Wajdelote’s recitals of the wrongs of a dear but downtrodden land, the indignation and resentment under a foreign yoke, and the appeal to arms for freedom and revenge, are all spoken in the cause of Poland, and are so felt by the native reader. Konrad’s dire vengeance on the conqueror is a picture of the secret hope of all Polish patriots of the final overthrow and punishment of the tyrant and the reëstablishment of Polish independence.