Ballad No. 1 (Chopin)

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The Ballade no. 1 in G minor , Op. 23 is a piece for solo piano by Frédéric Chopin .

Manuscript of the beginning of Ballad No. 1 Ballad No. 1 ? / i
Audio file / audio sample
Ballads No. 1–4, Opus 23, 38, 47, 52
Eunmi Ko

Origin and tradition

It was sketched in Vienna in 1831 and completed in Paris in 1835. In 1836 it appeared simultaneously in Leipzig, Paris and London and is dedicated to "Monsieur le Baron de Stockhausen". This refers to Bodo Albrecht von Stockhausen (1810–1885), who was active in the Hanoverian embassy in Paris from 1835 and there from 1841 to 1851 himself held the post of Hanoverian envoy. He was the father of the singer and patron Elisabeth von Herzogenberg . Bodo Albrecht von Stockhausen also owned a “dedication copy” of the ballad, which was later owned by his son Ernst von Stockhausen (1838–1905), who worked in Vienna as a composer, music critic and music teacher. This emerges from his sister's letter to Johannes Brahms on December 3, 1877.

The statement, which can be found on various occasions in Chopin's literature, that the work is dedicated to an - unspecified - "Nathaniel von Stockhausen" is obviously wrong.

analysis

  • A short unison introduction ( Largo ) ends with a lead chord ( sixth fourth chord), which is resolved in the first two bars of the moderato . As the musicologist Altug Ünlü demonstrated for the first time in 2000, this unison introduction is of great structural importance: all the building blocks that are presented there are taken up one after the other over the course of the piece and processed thematically and thematically.
  • The lyrical 1. topic in the majority 6 / 4 ¯ clock is for a light and elegant Fioritura replaced by a second theme that agitato and semper più mosso which over by shortening the thematic material from the first subject and by an expansion the entire keyboard experiences a great dynamic increase, which calando and smorzando expires.
  • It ends in Meno mosso , the sotto voce introduces a cantilena in E flat major as the 3rd theme, which experiences great increases in alternation with the 1st theme and the played around 2nd theme. Above organ point D, the 1st topic ends the main part in an open ending.
  • It leads from the pianissimo to forte possibile and on to the Alla breve -Stroke held Presto con fuoco overwritten, stretta-like coda . The G minor achieved is consolidated in a codetta alternating two-handed scales, piano chords and a rhapsodic motif reminiscent of the introduction to the ballad with its unison and lead chord as well as the second part of the 2nd theme. The ending receives a final increase in chromatic octave passages in countermovement and in unison, which with their quarter triplets are reminiscent of the 6/4 time of the main section.

Despite the different epic, lyrical and dramatic contents, the result is a stringently uniform effect, since “the elements are not yet separated here, but rather together, like in a living Ur-Ey.” This is guaranteed by the precepts that characterize all topics with subsequent secondary steps. This originally musical design therefore does not require any interpretation that assumes extra-musical content. The reference made by Chopin, who devotes himself to all poetry, about whom Robert Schumann reported that he was inspired to compose by poems by Adam Mickiewicz , does not refer to individual contents of nameable poems, but rather generally to their epic, lyrical and dramatic qualities.

reception

Although Chopin did not intend a program, the ballad was and is often interpreted as national music. The background is the year of origin 1831, which was marked by the intensification of the Russian and Prussian occupation of Poland after the failed November uprising. An example of the reception as national music is Roman Polański's film The Pianist , in which Władysław Szpilman performs the ballad after meeting a German officer and, despite adverse circumstances, achieves top pianistic performance.

In 1890 the poet Detlev von Liliencron , who was himself a passable pianist, translated the contrasting moods of the work into the intoxicating and sentimental in his poem Ballade in G minor .

The British journalist Alan Rusbridger , editor-in-chief and publisher of the daily newspaper The Guardian from 1995 to 2015 , dedicated an unusual book to the work in which he describes that he had set himself the goal of rehearsing it for a concert within a year, which he succeeded in doing. Well-known pianists were at his side, including Alfred Brendel , Daniel Barenboim and Murray Perahia , as well as Condoleezza Rice . The book was published in England in 2012 and a German translation in 2015.

literature

  • Tadeusz A. Zielinski, Chopin - His life, his work, his time , German: Bergisch Gladbach 1999, pp. 442–447
  • Alan Rusbridger, Play It Again - A year between notes and news , translated by Simon Elson and Kattrin Stier, Berlin: Secession-Verlag für Literatur, 2015, ISBN 978-3-905951-69-1
  • Why not play a little piano? , in: Der Spiegel , No. 36 of August 29, 2015, pp. 128–130 (interview with Alan Rusbridger) ( PDF )
  • Altuğ Ünlü , Frédéric Chopin's Ballade in G minor, op. 23 and its significance in the cyclical context - a structural analysis , in: Music as a program of life. Festschrift for Constantin Floros on his 70th birthday , ed. by Gottfried Krieger and Matthias Spindler, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000, pp. 47–62 ISBN 3-631- 35406-1 ( PDF )
  • Ballad # 1 : Sheet Music and Audio Files in the International Music Score Library Project
  • www.kreusch-sheet-music.net - Sheet music in the public domain of the complete work "Ballade No. 1"

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Maurice JE Brown , Chopin: An Index of His Works in Chronological Order , 2nd, revised edition, London: Macmillan Press, 1972, p. 73: “Dedicated to M. le Baron de Stockhausen, Hanoverian Ambassador to France (father of Elisabet [sic] Herzogenberg, the friend of Brahms). "
  2. ↑ Johannes Brahms in correspondence with Elisabet [sic] von Herzogenberg , ed. by Max Kalbeck , Volume 1, Berlin 1908, p. 35 (digitized version)
  3. ↑ Altuğ Ünlü: Frédéric Chopin's Ballade in G minor, Op. 23 and its significance in the cyclical context - a structural analysis . In: Gottfried Krieger and Matthias Spindler (eds.): Music as a life program. Festschrift for Constantin Floros on his 70th birthday . 1st edition. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-631-35406-1 .
  4. ↑ Johann Wolfgang Goethe on the literary ballad in: About art and antiquity . Vol. 3, H. 1, Stuttgart 1821, p. 50
  5. ↑ Robert Schumann: Collected writings on music and musicians. Edited by M. Kreisig, 5th edition, Leipzig 1914, vol. 3, p. 32
  6. ^ Detlev von Liliencron: Ballad in G minor in the Gutenberg-DE project