Library
Ballade No. 1
Chopin
LRSM 10 min 69 BPM target
7 days free. No card required.
Chopin's first Ballade invented a genre. It is a single movement with the sweep and narrative weight of an opera, built from two themes that are transformed and finally driven together. No literary programme survives, though its association with Mickiewicz's ballads has never quite gone away. The music is pure drama, from the sombre opening through the long-breathed theme in E-flat to a coda marked Presto con fuoco. There the whole structure is hurled to its close in double octaves.
It asks for a singing tone, flexible rubato and voicing inside thick chords early on, and for virtuoso stamina at the end. Nothing in it is forgiving, so it should wait until the technique is secure. The coda alone calls for octaves that most players spend years building.
Learnt in sections but held together by a clear sense of the whole, it shows how much a single movement can hold.
About this edition
Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23. Typeset by Knute Snortum, from IMSLP[1], licensed CC BY-SA 4.0[2]. Cropped and de-skewed for display; the adapted images are distributed under the same licence.
From the journal
The plan covers the whole piece, and the order changes as you practise it.
Start with the piece you have always wanted to play
7 days free. No card required.