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

by Edward Baxter Perry

Then the procession comes to a stand by the open grave. After a brief pause, the sweet, plaintive trio melody enters, pure and tender as a prayer, touched and thrilled to warmth and pathos by memories of happier days; after which the march movement is resumed, as the procession slowly and sadly returns to the village; the music, heavy, crushing, inexorable at first as the voice of fate, gradually recedes, diminishes, dies in the distance; and then follows the last movement, the presto, in some respects the most original and most impressive of all, the lament of the autumn night-wind over a forsaken grave, one of the few cases in which Chopin chose to be distinctly realistic, a literal and graphic imitation of wind effects; yet woven through it is an unmistakable suggestion of the mood of the hour and situation, the chill, the gloom, the wild despair, and a hint of that ever darker thought that will arise at such moments; after death, formless void, chaos.

There is an important vein of allegory underlying this whole story, like a deep substratum. The hero is a personification of the typical Polish patriot, struggling, in a forlorn hope, for his native land; the bride is Poland, and the mighty, overwhelming grief expressed is more than a personal sorrow: it is for the death and burial of a nation.

The authority for connecting the poem referred to with this sonata has been frequently questioned. I wish to state here that the poetic background to this great work is by no means hypothetically sketched in by my own imagination, however fully justified by the inherent character of the music. I have my data in full from Kullak and Liszt, the latter having been a personal friend of Chopin, as is well known, and having first presented the sonata in public to the musical world. We may safely assume, therefore, that he was correctly informed with regard to it, and that this interpretation is authentic and authoritative.

The Chopin Ballades

Probably no class of musical compositions ever presented to the world by any master has been so little understood, and consequently so much misrepresented as the ballades by Frederic Chopin. Even so standard an authority as Grove, in his “Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” writes as follows: “Ballade, a name adopted by Chopin for four pieces of pianoforte music, which have no peculiar form or character of their own, beyond being written in triple time, and to which the name seems to be no more applicable than that of sonnet to the pieces which others have written under that title”—a statement which proves that he had little information and less interest in regard to the subject.

The French word ballade, which Chopin used as title for these compositions, is derived from the Provencal ballata, a dancing song, which in turn comes from bellare, to dance; and our modern English words ballad, ball, ballet, all descend to us from the same source. In Italian, ballata meant a dancing piece, in distinction from sonata, a sounding piece, and cantata, a singing piece; and the ballade and ballata originally meant a piece of music to be sung while dancing or accompanied by dancing. The dance element, however, was early lost, and ballade in French, like ballad in English, came to mean a short and popular narrative poem adapted for singing or recitation. The ballad is a tale in verse. It differs from the epic in being briefer, less dignified in tone, and in concerning itself with actual practical events in the lives of individuals, instead of with historic and mythological subjects, which form the main province of the epic. The true ballad treats of some knightly exploit, some national episode, or some tale of love and adventure; and, as we shall see, Chopin, in adopting this title for instrumental compositions, adhered strictly to its definition and its literary characteristics and significance.

The Chopin ballades, four in number and ranking among his most strikingly original and effective contributions to pianoforte music, introduced an entirely new and distinctly unique musical form, well-nigh limitless in its possibilities of expression and application, its facile adaptability to every phase of emotional and descriptive writing. As was natural, they opened the way for a host of more or less worthy followers, bold, independent free lances, heedless of the forms and rules which bind in rank and file the more orderly conservative compositions; all bearing a strong racial resemblance, but variously designated by such special clan cognomens as ballade, novelette, legend, fable, fairy-tale, and the like. They now constitute a complete and markedly individual school of composition, of which Chopin in his ballades was the originator, and which is differentiated from all others by its distinctly declamatory, narrative style.

Chopin used the name ballade in the sense in which it is employed in modern literature—to designate a short, poetic narrative, a miniature epic, as distinguished from the lyric, didactic, and dramatic forms of poetry. He intended the ballade in music to be a counterpart of the ballad in poetry, and his inventive genius and unerring taste supplied and perfected a form precisely adapted to the end in view; a form which is strictly akin neither to the rondo, the sonata allegro, nor the free fantasia, though having certain points of resemblance to all three, still less to any of the dance forms. It reminds us more of some of the larger, more complex song forms, as, for instance, the musical settings by Schubert and others of the more pretentious German ballads by Goethe, Berger, and Uhland; but its development is broader and ampler, at once more extended and more logical, evincing a greater degree of constructive musicianship.

Chopin’s able biographer, Karasowski, says of the ballades: “Some regarded them as a variety of the rondo; others, with more accuracy, called them poetical stories. Indeed, there is about them a narrative tone (Märchenton) which is particularly well rendered by the six-four and six-eight time, and which makes them differ essentially from the existing forms.” In view of these facts, patent even to the superficial student of Chopin’s life and works, it seems very strange that we should so often hear and even see in print sneering insinuations to the effect that the composer christened these works ballades for lack of any better or more appropriate name; that the title has in reality nothing of significance or distinctness, which is justified either by the form or the content of the works.