What essentially characterizes this Ballade is the clear and distinguishable textures of its inimical elements. An almost undisturbed opening - andantino and sotto voce - limpidly idyllic, even georgic, ebbs and flows, in this instance, a musical counterpart to "The Switez" or "The Lake of the Willies" by Adam Mickiewicz - this lake, "smooth as a sheet of ice, in which by night the stars gaze upon their own images."
The deliberate, almost Apollonian nature of these measures is something even more meditative than anything parallel in Mozart. That Chopin revered the music of Mozart is no secret, but the secret to interpreting these measures with the exactness of intent of their composer will only be realized with the understanding that this music is Chopin as Mozart at his best, "drawn from the people's storehouse of song." Two triplet figures of gently lilting A's lead us into the tempestuous and wildly extravagant 'presto con fuoco' with its boldly attuned cadences, driven octaves and tyrranous passage-work.
One is almost reminded of the Nocturne Op. 15 No. 1, in the same key, composed five years earlier in the year 1833, where once again a still and yielding motif gives way to a tempestuous theme 'con fuoco'.
Similarly, Barbadette sees this Nocturne as a "calm and beautiful lake, ruffled by a sudden storm" - Mickiewicz's lake, "smooth as a sheet of ice, in which by night, the stars gaze upon their own images."
But where the simplicity and calm of the beginning returns in the Nocturne, the Ballade ends with what C. Ashton Jonson calls a "terrific shuddering catastrophe" by way of a coda, errily in the key of A minor like the maiden of Mickiewicz's legend, swallowed by the opening earth and transformed into fantastical, runic flowers....Rubinstein's flowers - "the field flower a rustic maiden, the wind a knight, and so almost in every instrumental composition."
PHILLIP WILCHER
April 2002
(Article originally published by Music Teacher Magazine)
