Chopin's Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 — written in the summer of 1842 at George Sand's country house at Nohant, the last of his four ballades, and dedicated to Baronne Charlotte de Rothschild. It runs 11 minutes, and the same theme comes back three times, more elaborately decorated each time; then, just before the music breaks out, everything stops for 8 bars of bare chords. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
A summer at Nohant, and the last of the four ballades
Chopin wrote this piece at Nohant in the summer of 1842. Nohant was George Sand's country house, where he spent several summers writing from 1839 on: Paris winters were bad for his lungs, the countryside was quiet, and there were no lessons to give. He finished the Barcarolle and part of the Polonaise-Fantaisie in the same years, the last stretch in which his output was steady.
This is the last of the four ballades. The first dates from 1835; all four are single movements in compound time, and none carries a word of explanation. Chopin coined the title himself, taking a word that belonged to poetry and giving it to a piano piece — and never said what the story was.
The score is dedicated to Baronne Charlotte de Rothschild, of the Paris branch of the family and one of Chopin's pupils; in his last years his Paris income came largely from lessons in households like hers.
It was not especially popular in his lifetime: reviews placed it well below the first ballade. Its standing among the central works of the piano literature is a twentieth-century verdict.
A piece that gathers for a long time and detonates once
The first 7 bars are a gently rocking introduction that sounds like tuning up, or someone clearing their throat. The theme arrives at bar 8, very thin — one line with a few notes underneath, the count dropping from around 40 a bar to 13.
For the next ten minutes the piece does one thing: it says the same sentence again, more elaborately each time. The second statement (4:08) adds decoration; the third (7:48) sets another line against it. Around the three-minute mark a broader second theme opens out, as though you had stepped outdoors.
At 6:22 there is a remarkable bar — one bar on the page, 91 notes in it, and 32 seconds long. It is the densest point in the piece and sounds like a sheet of water coming down; after it the music drops to almost nothing.
At 10:01 comes the quietest passage in the whole piece: 8 bars in a row with only 5 to 8 notes each, chords set down one at a time. It is not an ending, it is an intake of breath — and from 10:13 the last 58 bars go off, both hands at once, and do not stop.
This one does not work as background: the dynamic range is enormous and the coda is four times as dense as the opening. It rewards sitting down and hearing it through.
Two hundred and thirty-nine bars, six thousand notes, and the densest of them at the end
239 bars and 6,322 sounding notes, with 20 grace notes besides, in 6/8 and F minor, with no repeats. The score carries 125 dynamics, 178 hairpins and 374 pedal spans.
The bar-by-bar counts mark the structure plainly. The introduction, bars 1 to 7, runs between 21 and 42 notes a bar; the theme's entry at bar 8 drops to 13, among the thinnest bars in the piece. From bar 58 the second theme brings the count back to between 36 and 46.
Bar 134 is the one extreme value in the piece: 91 notes and 32.3 seconds long, with only 30-odd in the bars either side. Bar 135 falls straight to 9, a tenfold drop.
Bars 203 to 210 hold between 5 and 8 notes, the thinnest stretch of all; bar 211 jumps at once to 39 and stays between 39 and 56 until bar 237 falls back to 8 and the last bar to 6.
The range runs from C1 to F7, just over six octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.029 seconds.
The difficulty is budgeting eleven minutes of energy
First, plan the volume. The piece travels from very quiet to its loudest, and the loudest is in the final fifty-eight bars; if each of the three theme statements is played harder than the last, there is nothing left for the coda. Hold the first ten minutes back.
Second, the three statements must differ. The first is a plain drawing, the second adds decoration, the third sets a second line underneath — and each has a different subject: the melody, then how the decoration hangs on the melody, then how two lines give way to each other.
Third, the flood at bar 134. Ninety-one notes have to sound like one event, not ninety-one notes; practise it first as a few large chords, find the direction, then open it out.
Fourth, the eight bars from 203. They are easily played as a blank interval, but they have content — every chord needs weight, and each should be quieter than the one before.
Fifth, the coda. Fifty-eight bars of unbroken two-hand figuration is a test of stamina; work in sections and slowly, and do not start at full speed.
The tempo follows the printed dotted-quarter equals 34: this source prints Andante con moto with a metronome mark at bar 1, so nothing is substituted. The source also carries over two hundred point-by-point tempo marks recording rubato, which normalisation folds away while the played rise and fall is kept.
We rate this 5 out of 5.
The other three ballades, and the same summer's work
This channel already has the First Ballade in G minor, Op. 23 — the best known of the four and the usual way in. Heard together the two show how much more complex Chopin made the same form over seven years: the First keeps its sections distinct, while the Fourth keeps transforming one theme.
The Second in F major, Op. 38 and the Third in A-flat, Op. 47 have not been made yet.
From the same years come the Barcarolle, Op. 60 and the Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61, among the finest of his late works. The channel also has several Chopin nocturnes and waltzes, all gathered in the Chopin playlist.
