Carlo Grante Plays Chopin’s Ballades and Scherzos. THE PROGRAM performed in Vienna’s Musikverein, 24 October 2014; at New York’s Lincoln Center ATH, 31 October 2014, and in Berlin at the Kammermusiksaal der Berliner Philharmonie, 14 January 2015, in the series “Masters of High Romanticism”

Frédéric CHOPIN (1810-1849)

The 4 Ballades:

No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 (1831-35) No. 2 in F, Op. 38 (1836-39) No. 3 in A flat, Op. 47 (1840-41) No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 (1842)

The 4 Scherzos:

No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20 (1831 ff.) No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 31(1837) No. 3 in C sharp minor, Op. 39 (1839) No. 4 in E, Op. 54 (1842)

Chopin’s Sound World and Sense of Form in the Ballades and Scherzos

by Carlo Grante

The piano music of Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) is beloved by almost all pianists, and is often held up to be the quintessential compositional artwork for the instrument. It is also music which music lovers appreciate for its directly engaging quality, its undeniable beauty and enjoyment. Chopin’s piano compositions also impress theorists, who find they offer rich perspectives for analysis (for example, Schenkerian, set theory, harmonic, multi-linear, formal, even twelve-tone).

Chopin’s teachings were also for over a century almost secretively kept alive by direct transmission between teachers and students of great talent, though without the support of important written theoretical documentation. These teachings now inspire teachers and pianists who privilege a type of piano practice based primarily on treating technique as a means to anchor a desired sound image and emotional state. For the modern musician, the musical image is a model, a touchstone between real execution and an idealized or imagined one. The “secret” of his approach is the sound that Chopin asks his students to build in their minds, full of expressive and emotional references. The master demands complete integration of mind, emotion, analysis and physical performance; it is Chopin’s way of living and experiencing music during the practice phase of playing his compositions.

Chopin’s music is considered a nearly perfect invention for the piano. Rather than relying on merely “manual” devices and the established vocabulary that composers like Clementi and Czerny favored at the beginning of the 1800s, Chopin pioneers a type of writing for the piano in which unpredictability of form and instrumental idiom is integrated into a logically unfolding musical structure — with Bach as its source. This Chopin combines with innovations in harmonic language and an unparalleled voice leading. It is hard to imagine piano music with as strong an inner consistency. These unique factors produce on those who play Chopin’s music a strong technical propensity to realize the demands of Chopin’s sound world according to its inherent compositional logic and the end result, its expression. Such expressiveness is not only embodied in the music’s bel canto quality, but also in the specific sound characteristics of and techniques required to play the instrument. Chopin’s music teaches us how to understand the physiology of instrumental writing, just as the music of Bach teaches us to feel the structure and aesthetics of the language of Western music.

Chopin’s masters in absentia were Mozart and Bach. Bach’s imitative counterpoint is everywhere in Chopin, as are Mozart’s “eternal principles” (the ones Chopin told Delacroix that Beethoven had turned his back on). From Mozart, Chopin took the practice of motivic variation, which could be as subtle as a slight rhythmic change, or vocally gestural, as in the unmistakably Chopinesque arabesques. When Chopin does not vary a motive recurring in the unfolding of a musical thought process, this is very deliberate. The ostinato 6-note motive with which the First Ballade starts is a rare case of a motive that does not undergo melodic variation. It follows a disconcerting introduction that begins with a slowly arpeggiated chord, and where the music changes mood radically in just a few measures. The only other notable example of this kind is in the Second Scherzo, with again a 6-note motive of similar melodic shape (here with contracted intervals), again not subject to variation: in both cases, this seems to express a feeling of resigned suffering and fatalism, a repressed idée fixe that, interestingly, Brahms reuses, in a similar melodic gesture, as principal motive of his Ballade in B minor.

Chopin’s genre titles—such as Ballades and Scherzos—were both the result and the cause of a change in the role of “minor” forms at a transitional moment in his era. The first of each were written before he arrived in Paris in September 1831, though revised and published later. (The years of composition were: First Ballade - 1831 (begun in Vienna during uprisings and danger to his compatriots in his native Poland, final version 1835), Second Ballade - 1836-39, Third - 1841, and Fourth - 1842; First Scherzo - 1831-34 (also begun in Vienna), Second - 1837, Third - 1839 (during the disastrous ‘vacation’ in Majorca with George Sand), and Fourth Scherzo - 1843.)

His use of such forms is new in terms of sheer amplitude of conception; it is ambitious in successfully combining, in the Ballades, both “narrative” and Classical form, two types of compositional structure that appear incompatible. In the Scherzos he develops a sonata movement into a genre of unsurpassed creative quality. Hearing the famous Second Scherzo with the palindrome of the typical sonata movement in mind, only on repeated listening does one realize that the first pages, replicated before the large middle section sets in, are actually a sonata exposition repeated (with typical minor variations), as if there were a double bar with a repeat sign at the end of the section. By the same token, in each of the four Ballades one can in fact better recognize the “sonata quasi fantasia” ideal that Beethoven committed to history in his Op. 27 sonatas (including the “Moonlight”) than the adventurous “fantasia quasi sonata” idea behind Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata.

Analysts and scholars of Chopin’s Ballades have progressively come to the view that they do not so much exhibit a narrative form as a near-sonata architecture, or at least that there is a sonata archetype behind each work. According to Gerald Abraham, the First Ballade showed “signs that Chopin was beginning to understand something of the real essence of sonata form.” William Rothstein found that “all of the Ballades make some reference to the conventions of nineteenth-century sonata form; the Second Ballade is again a partial exception, being less sonata-like than the others.” So, after more than a century of received opinion focusing on the improvisatory, narrative style of the Ballades, it might surprise us that after all these works are held together by a sonata- form architecture that thanks to modern formal theory is really better understood as a thought process, rather than a conventional compositional mould. The interpreter / scholar Charles Rosen, advocate of the sonata archetype in these works and keen to project a sense of unity in them, held that “the fusion of the narrative and lyric in the Ballades is perhaps Chopin’s greatest achievement: he realized in music one of the major ambitions of the Romantic poets and novelists.

Schumann, to whom Chopin himself played the First Ballade in Leipzig in 1836, regarded the piece as one of Chopin’s “wildest and most curious”, though it was also his favorite (Chopin admitted to Schumann that it was his favorite, too). Schumann was the dedicatee of Chopin’s Second Ballade, which he considered “to rank below the first as a work of art, but [was] no less fantastic and ingenious. The passionate central sections seem to have been added later; I well remember hearing Chopin play the Ballade here [Leipzig, 1836] and conclude it in F major; today it ends in A minor.”

The First Ballade establishes a formal model that is developed in different ways in the other Ballades. The most notable elements are: a thematic bipolarity that, like in a sonata, uses two different—and unconventional—tonal areas for its main themes. Having in mind the sonata-form archetype, the exposition in the Chopin Ballades lacks a conventional tonal dialectic and a monotonal recapitulation in the tonic, the latter treated more like the beginning of an apotheosis, an emotional escalation leading to the end of the piece. The finale of the First Ballade has perhaps the most eloquent stylistic signature of Chopin’s virtuosic sections, evoking a sense of catharsis of earlier drama, here in an expanded cadential section, with an apparently traditional “liquidation” or vanishing of thematic materials, only for them to be reinstated (here in a compelling recitative style) near the end.

We find this procedure also in the Second and Fourth Ballade and First and Third Scherzo, whereas the Second and Fourth Scherzo and most notably the Third Ballade feature a more gestural, “operatic” grand finale, in which the themes are treated like characters of a plot with an exhilarating concertato ending. It is no coincidence that such theatrical deus ex machina should occur in only the major key finales and that Liszt, the intelligent, eloquent master of theatrical gestures and drama, should favor this procedure in so many of his works. This type of architectural shape, this sense of “dramatic crescendo” towards the end of the piece, is represented at its best in the Fourth Ballade, especially in the treatment of the return of the theme decorated in an improvisatory style (an ingenious blend of Baroque keyboard and Romantic operatic ornamental improvisation), followed by an emotional escalation quite unique in Chopin’s compositional output.

According to Michael Klein, “in Chopin’s larger works, including the Ballades, formal/expressive logic is directed toward … apotheosis, ‘a special kind of recapitulation that reveals unexpected harmonic richness and textural excitement in a theme previously presented with a deliberately restricted harmonization and a relatively drab accompaniment.’” In the First and Fourth Ballade, the apotheosis does not occur in the codas, but rather some time before that. The coda of the Fourth Ballade contains one of the most illustrious and striking example of an extended cadential section (which follows a mysterious descent of a pianissimo chorale-like chord progression, on a dominant pedal point), to be found in High Romantic piano compositions. In these two works there are also some recurring local features pointed out by Klein, such as the waltz, the Berceuse, apotheosis, Polonaise, and pastorale-like sections. Klein points up the differences between “lyric” and “narrative” time: narrative time is “time passing” while lyric time is “time arrested.”

Factors unifying all the Ballades - we could say their “signature” - are the pastorale-like sections, which, although acting like seeming moments of repose, are actual thematic areas. In these sections the second theme (the first theme in the Second Ballade) unfolds in a serene, Arcadian mood, with the typical siciliano rhythm hinted at, rather than present throughout. Another important unifying factor is the waltz, which seems to surface as a surprise in all but the Second Ballade.

In hearing all the Ballades and Scherzos in a single recital, the listener is at once challenged by and privileged to encounter the full array of compositional, formal, instrumental, expressive and aesthetic features found in Chopin’s music.

There have been attempts at finding melodic links among the works. But aside from the few common motivic and harmonic references that one can find in several of them with attentive listening, of the many elements common to the eight works perhaps the most important is the sense of narrative “mission” that suffuses each of them. In the narrative works par excellence that are the Ballades, this “mission” remains subject to the architectural discipline of an invisible sonata thought process. In the Scherzos, the unfolding of the musical discourse is as compact and tightly knit as that of their formal predecessor in the multi-movement sonata, the minuet.

Chopin gives new meaning to the title Scherzo. His four Scherzos have captured the attention of scholars less than the Ballades, though they remain frequently played individually in concert programs. If one were to program Ballades and Scherzos in pairs, what would be the ideal sets of one each? One could probably imagine the Second Ballade followed by the Fourth Scherzo (linking the key of A minor to E major, and the soft ending on A to the soft beginning on B). One could link the last A-flat major forte chord of the Third Ballade and the half-diminished 7th fortissimo chord of the First Scherzo, for example.

In tonight’s program, first the Ballades and then the Scherzos are played in simple numerical order. We hope that hearing the eight works together will be a stimulating and memorable experience, an ideal entry point into the sound world of High Romantic piano music.

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