Chopin's Ballade No. 2, Op. 38 — it begins in F major and ends in A minor, and never goes back. Written between 1836 and 1839 and dedicated to Schumann, who three years earlier had dedicated his own Kreisleriana to Chopin. It runs seven minutes forty-five; the first two are a quiet pastoral, and then Presto con fuoco comes straight up out of pp, the two materials alternating to the end. This one is not in the background playlists — it will startle you. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
Two composers dedicating works to each other
In 1835 Schumann dedicated Kreisleriana, Op. 16, to Chopin. Schumann was among Chopin's earliest public champions — the famous line "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius" that he printed in 1831 was about Chopin.
In 1839 Chopin dedicated this ballade to Schumann. It was the return.
Then Schumann wrote a review saying this was not the version he remembered. He said Chopin had once played it to him and that it had ended in F major — the key it starts in. The published version ends in A minor.
Whether Schumann misremembered or Chopin later changed it is not settled. The manuscripts do not decide it and both readings have supporters. Only one fact survives: the printed score begins in F major and ends in A minor.
The word "ballade" is borrowed. Before Chopin it meant a narrative poem, something sung, not a category of piano piece. He wrote four, and turned a literary term into a kind of piano music — Liszt, Brahms and Fauré all wrote ballades afterwards.
There is a persistent story that the four ballades take their subjects from the narrative poems of Adam Mickiewicz. That is a legend — Chopin never said so, and the claim first appears in writing years after his death.
It is on the soundtrack album of The Pianist
The 2002 film The Pianist takes its music almost entirely from Chopin — eleven of the twelve tracks on the soundtrack album — and this ballade is one of them.
The first two minutes are quiet enough to forget it has not finished
It opens as a pastoral. 6/8, a single line in the right hand, the left rocking gently, the volume between p and pp, with no sign of going anywhere. That lasts two minutes fifty — long enough to assume the whole piece is like this.
What happens at 2:57 is the biggest drop in the piece. Presto con fuoco: the tempo doubles, both hands come up at once, and the volume goes from pp straight to ff. Everything the piece has been holding back arrives here.
At 3:55 the pastoral returns, but it does not stay; the material starts being interrupted and cut up.
From 5:58 comes the second Presto, longer and fiercer than the first, running all the way to the close at 6:39.
The ending is unusual: the music does not return to F major but stops in A minor, and the last bars hold only five or six notes, as though it broke off mid-sentence.
This is not one to leave playing. The first two minutes will relax you and the third will lift you out of the chair. Its moods field is empty, so no situation playlist will queue it.
Two hundred and five bars, two materials alternating four times
Two hundred and five bars, no repeats, in 6/8, with the key signature moving from F major's single flat to none — which is why it lands in A minor. Four thousand two hundred and nineteen sounding notes, plus six grace notes. The score carries two hundred and ninety-nine dynamics, sixty-four hairpins and a hundred and seventy pedal spans.
The structure alternates two materials: pastoral in bars 1 to 46, Presto con fuoco in bars 47 to 82, the pastoral again in bars 83 to 140, a second Presto from bar 141, and the close from bar 169.
Bar counts run between five and forty-eight, averaging twenty point six — an unusually wide spread, and not at random: the pastoral gives fourteen to twenty notes a bar and the Presto thirty-four to forty-eight. You can tell which section you are in from the proportion of black on the page.
The range is D1 to E7, six octaves. The shortest note lasts 0.028 seconds — in the Presto runs, shorter than a single frame at 30 fps, so those notes do not each get one.
Bars 1, 2, 105, 117, 124, 130 and the last four drop below eight notes, and those are the joins.
The difficulty is making the two materials sound like one piece
First, do not make the pastoral too beautiful. It has to feel as though nothing has happened yet, or the moment that follows does not land; played as a finished little piece, the Presto becomes an intruder.
Second, the first note of the Presto. There is no transition from pp to ff, so it has to be decisive; half a beat of hesitation and the drop is gone.
Third, the left hand in the Presto. Both hands run at once and the left easily turns to mush; that line has its own direction and it should be audible.
Fourth, the close. The last bars hold five or six notes and are easily played as "the end"; it is not an end, it is a stop.
Fifth, the pedal. The hundred and seventy pedal marks are concentrated in the Presto sections and the pastoral barely uses any; follow the page.
The tempo is 80 to the quarter. Bar 1 carries only Andantino with no metronome mark, so the figure comes from the conventional band for that marking, ♩ 80 to 108, taken at the bottom. The bottom because this Andantino is a single-line pastoral, and the middle of the band would push it into a walk and flatten the contrast that follows. At 80 the recording runs 7 minutes 41.
We rate this 5 out of 5.
Four ballades, and three of them are here
Chopin wrote four ballades: No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23; this No. 2 in F major, Op. 38; No. 3 in A flat major, Op. 47; and No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52. This channel has the first and the fourth, and only the third is missing.
All four run between seven and eleven minutes, the largest single-movement piano works he wrote.
His other big single pieces include the four scherzos, the Fantaisie Op. 49 and the Barcarolle Op. 60. None has been made yet.
