Frédéric Chopin – Ballade #1 in G Minor, Op. 23 (1836)

The First Ballade might be the most free-associative out of all of them.  Sure, it’s got recurring material, including a slow, melancholy, waltz-like theme (similar in character to the main theme of the Fourth), and a melody that first appears in a delicate, vaguely Fauré-like form but later reappears in huge fortissimo chords.  But there are also bursts of fast virtuosic music that don’t seem to relate to each other or to anything around them, and at one point one of the recurring themes turns into the other one without warning.  The slow fanfare that opens the piece never reappears, and the odd gesture that follows it, just three notes long and ending on a piquant major seventh chord in 4/2 position, is never “explained” by later developments.  The ending is downright weird:  a disconnected collection of rapid scales, minor triads set to funereal rhythms, and aggressive six-note figures in octaves that are almost quotes from the F Minor Prelude.  I don’t really have a lot to say about the piece;  maybe I’m just not in the right mood, or maybe I’m succumbing to the “later work is more developed” bias, but I feel like the formal experimentation and oddness here doesn’t really add up to anything meaningful the way it does in the other three ballades.  The slow melodies are perfectly well-constructed, but they don’t really speak to me;  the virtuosic passages feel a bit like they’re spinning their wheels.  There’s certainly nothing as directly hooked-int0-my-soul as that minor-major shift on a repeated cadential figure in the Third Ballade.  Oh well.

Frédéric Chopin – Ballade #2 in F Major, Op. 38 (1839)

If the Third Ballade is basically about how to pull familiar material out of your hat at the last minute, and the Fourth is basically about letting material expand until it bursts, then the Second is basically about the reconciliation of opposites.  It sets up a sharp contrast:  a gentle, lilting 6/8 theme in F major that at times seems to evoke old American folk music (I assume not intentionally — it’s just that it’s pretty rare to find such an emphasis on the iii chord in major in early Romantic music), and a dark and stormy theme in A minor, full of cascading arpeggios and pounding left-hand octaves.  (Incidentally, there are some awfully Schuberty modulations in this second theme — a series of progressions that sound like they’re going to go i – VII7 – III but instead go i – VII7 – iii — so maybe the harmonies I commented on in the Third Ballade aren’t so unusual for Chopin after all.)

So the question is:  what do these two themes have to do with each other?  Chopin tries combining them in various ways.  The first time he moves from slow to fast, there’s no transition, just six ringing As to introduce the new key.  He gets back by letting the music droop, almost like a record going from 45 to 33 RPM:  the scalar figure that closes the section not only gets quieter and slower, but it drops by a whole tone each time it’s repeated.  But the second time he moves from slow to fast he does it differently, because the second slow section has a very different character from the first.  It’s no longer tranquil, no longer content to simply modulate from I to iii and back again;  now it’s full of strange chromatic modulations and crescendos that tug on the reins, not to mention an unexpected silence after the first phrase that feels more like an interruption than a natural pause for breath.  And this time, it’s one of those crescendos that leads us into the fast music, bridging the gap between the two themes.  Chopin also introduces a motif from the first theme into the left hand of the second, so that the two themes are not only less disjunct but also less dissimilar than they were the first time around.

And then, as seems to be typical of the Ballades, he goes off in another direction at the end, introducing a new A-minor theme marked “agitato,” a demonic sped-up waltz full of fast apoggiaturas.  And finally, after that violent interlude, he returns to a fragment of slow music from the opening of the piece — but it’s transposed to A minor, and the piece ends in that key.  The two themes have been unified once again — the material of the first now in the key and mode of the second — and the result is that what had been calm and gentle is now tinged with sadness.

Frédéric Chopin – Ballade #4 in F Minor, Op. 52 (1842)

At some point many years ago, I read a chapter in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas in which he raved about the brilliance of an insanely complex polyrhythmic passage in Chopin’s Fourth Ballade.  I remember checking out the piece, not hearing anything that sounded all that insanely polyrhythmic, and not pursuing it further.  Now that I’ve found the passage, I’m really not sure what to think about its level of insanity.  On the page, it really is an impressive construction:  in 6/8, the left hand plays 16th-note arpeggios that each last half a bar, while the right hand plays 16th-note triplets — with every fourth right-hand note emphasized.  The two patterns take two bars to come together again, and that’s how long the passage lasts.  But in performance — and I listened to two different recordings, one by Murray Perahia and one by Abbey Simon — it doesn’t sound like a polyrhythm so much as a written-out rubato suspended over a rolling wave of sound.  And while the way Chopin notated it is unusual, the effect is quite typical of his work.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the Fourth Ballade is mainly about how simple melodies can be swept up in rolling waves of sound.  Throughout the piece, he takes themes that were initially simple and brings them back in wildly elaborated forms, sprouting filigree in all directions.  By the end of the piece, the filigree seems to have taken over.  Death by virutosity.

I have to admit that the piece starts hitting my “too many notes” button after a while, and I very much prefer the more economical Third Ballade.  But the Fourth does have its simpler passages too.  Its main theme is just a long, lyrical melody over a slow, waltz-like accompaniment, and it’s infused with a powerful sense of melancholy.  There’s also a great moment later in the piece where that melody is recast in an even simpler rhythm (almost all eighth notes!) and treated canonically.  It’s like a rarefied, skeletal version of a familiar melody, and when it finally blossoms into its original form eleven measures in — in a spot that makes it clear that the melody is starting its third phrase, even though that gesture had previously seemed to be echoing the ending of the second  — I think it’s a far more expansive and moving moment of transformation than when Chopin turns already fairly complex music into hyper-virtuosic explosions.

Frédéric Chopin – Ballade #3 in Ab Major, Op. 47 (1841)

Great piece.  I’m surprised by how much it reminds me of Schubert — not just in its particular type of gracefulness, or its way of mixing tranqulity and melancholy by using diminished seventh chords in a major context, but also in its harmonic motion.  In particular, there’s a passage that I’m amazed to know was written by someone other than Schubert:  a little cadential figure consisting of a trill on le and dominant arpeggios in contrary motion is unexpectedly moved up a whole step from Bb Minor to C minor, and then even more unexpectedly repeated in C major.  The quiet pulsing octaves that introduce the B section also bear more than a little resemblance to the pulsing thirds that fill a similar role in the first of Schubert’s Moments musicaux (1828).  And come to think of it, the opening gesture of the Ballade is pretty similar to that of Beethoven’s Op. 101 piano sonata (1816).  I guess what I’m really saying is that the piece sounds surprisingly Austro-Germanic for Chopin (except for the ending, which is very obviously by the same composer as the Etudes).

I decided to listen to this because my friend Daniel commented on my previous Chopin post that the Ballades are a good place to start on Chopin’s larger-scale works.  And it certainly is an interesting piece formally.  At first I thought it was going to turn out to be a series of unrelated sections, an ABCD form.  But at the last minute, the D section turns into an A’ section, recasting the desultory music from the beginning of the piece in two entirely new styles:  first as a stormy minor-mode virtuoso etude, and then as a cheery, almost corny piece of parlor music.  Considering that this is pretty much exactly what Poulenc does in all his music, maybe the piece is more French than I give it credit for.

Frédéric Chopin – Two Polonaises, Op. 26 (1836)

The Chopin pieces I know best by far are the Preludes (1839).  After that it’s probably the two books of Etudes (1832 and 1836), and I’ve also heard a miscellaneous collection of waltzes and nocturnes.  Pretty much all of those are single-serving pieces, so it’s interesting to see what he does with slightly more extended forms in these two polonaises (each is about seven minutes long).  The first is written as two successive bipartite forms, one in C# minor and the other in Db major;  Rubinstein treats it like a minuet or scherzo and trio and plays the C# minor section again at the end, which isn’t indicated in the score but which is probably necessary for the piece to hold together.  The Db major section is a straightforward rounded binary:  the second half ends with a literal recap of the entire first half.  But the C# minor section is sneakier:  both sections end identically, but the piece’s opening four measures aren’t recapitulated, and the phrase that follows is harmonically altered so that you don’t realize you’re hearing repeated material until it’s already started.  Chopin’s harmonic and gestural language is rather elusive in general, and especially so in this piece, with its apparent shift to the parallel major that turns out to be a long V/iv, and its apparent modulation to the Neapolitan that soon shifts right back into the tonic.  His sideways slide into familiar material therefore fits right in as just another sleight-of-hand maneuver.  While the piece’s structural boundaries are clearly defined once you know where to look for them, they’re rarely articulated, which gives the piece a stream-of-consciousness feeling.  It helps that I’m listening to a recording by Artur Rubinstein, who takes plenty of liberties with the tempo — but even leaving aside issues of historical performance practice, the piece encourages that approach by landing frequently on dissonant suspensions and surprising chromatic harmonic shifts.  (I can’t believe I only learned about neo-Riemannian analysis this year.  As far as I can tell, traditional tonal analysis is inadequate to describe just about anything after Beethoven.)  Particularly juicy is a passage in the B section in which the left hand plays fast, convoluted melodies while the right hand plays quiet eighth-note dyads with a slower melody on top;  for a moment the music sounds almost octatonic, and when it passes through F minor, Chopin hits my favorite appoggiatura, re over (or in this case under) a i chord.  Very little else in tonal music is as piquant as that particular dissonance.

The second polonaise is a sort of altered rondo:  its form is ||: A :|| B A C A B A.  This time the most striking element is a phrase from the B section:   ascending scales over thick repeated chords that land on mi-do figures first in A major and then in F major, creating what sounds to me like a deliberate allusion to the finale of Schubert’s late C minor piano sonata (1828).  (And note that third relationship;  hi, Riemann!)  Everything I said about the first polonaise applies here as well.

One final note:  the polonaise was originally a type of dance, named in France for its Polish origin (kind of like how “allemande” means “German” in French).  If these two pieces have anything to do with that dance other than the pro forma appearance of a certain rhythmic figure at the very beginning of the first one, I’ll eat my hat.  I know you could say that about huge amounts of the standard rep, but this is and extreme case.  At least Chopin’s waltzes usually have something resembling an oom-pah-pah bassline.