aug 1, 1835 - G Minor Ballade

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Mimics the polish ballade poetry of Mickiewicz, reflecting the characteristic structure and rhetoric of the poetic ballad. It was one of the most sophisticated and successful adaptations of music and literature achieved in the nineteenth century. No wonder it was influential.


But if the ballade is a narrative, what kind of story is it telling? One scholar has recently suggested that Chopin invented the instrumental ballade as a vehicle to tell the story of Poland as Chopin and his fellow emigres conceived it--not the story of POland's lamentable past (although that past is surely referred to) but the story of its future, a story of impending revolution. THat emphasis in teh G minor ballade is what conditioned its thrlling trajectory from a subdued beginning to a blaze of fiery, even tragic glory. And ti seems that Chopin's audiences got the message. It is remarkable that the work was almost universally interpreted as Chopin's most seriously antionalistic endeavor, although unlike the mazurkas and polonaises, its musical style is not marked as specifically Polish. Chopin pulled off the extraordinary feat of telling anational story using universal ingredients. Poland--whose national sovereignty had been forcibly eradicated to ad tot he property of three European dynasties--would become the great emblem of the widespread political unrest and revolutionary activities acrossa Eruope in 1848. In his ballade, Chopin displayed that emblem to all of Europe in a language everyone could understand, and respond to, as theirs. So the national question, while originally posed in terms of folklore, nevertheless quickly transceneded it. The reception of CHopin's ballade, like that of many other national musical monuments, proved that nationalism in music is defined not by style alone but by a much more complex interaction between creative intentions and listener perceptions.

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