Ballades

Ballades. Fryderyk Chopin. , 'Everyone saw in this music, as in the clouds, something different for himself' , Félicien Mallefille, Chopin created the genre of the piano ballade. Before Chopin, the name ballad referred in music not to works for solo piano, but to vocal-instrumental pieces determined by a poetical text, singing of love or heroic deeds. Ballads appeared, for example, in mediaeval France in the repertoire of the troubadours and trouvères. In literature, mainly thanks to the poets Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, the ballad became one of the more characteristic genres of romanticism, combining features of the lyric, epic and dramatic., Despite the lack of any documented evidence from Chopin himself, commentators have sought extra-musical references in his ballades, especially to the works of Polish bard Adam Mickiewicz. That is because they appear to tell the listener a musical story., Chopin's four ballades are among the most important works in this oeuvre, and the Ballade in G minor, Op. 23 is often cited as being a ground-breaking work, on account of the shift away from the brilliant style and the internal drama.