Ballade (music)

A ballade (French for "ballad'; pronounced bah-LAHD) refers to a one-movement musical piece with lyrical and dramatic narrative qualities.

Medieval Ballades

The term "ballade" was used to describe one type of musical setting of French poetry common in the 14th and 15th centuries. One of the "formes fixes", the ballade typically featured a prominent upper voice, which was texted, and two lower voices which may have been vocalised or performed with instruments. Guillaume de Machaut is the most famous composer of polyphonic ballades; the style continued to be popular among composers of the "Ars Subtilior", though it fell out of fashion by the middle of the 15th century.

The poetic form is typically AaB, in which the B is a shorter, concluding line, or refrain (sometimes called an envoi). The two "a" sections use the same melody but with different texts.

Romantic Ballades

Late 18th century Germans used the term "ballade" to describe folklike narrative poetry (following Johann Gottfried Herder), some of which was set to music by composers such as Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Carl Friedrich Zelter, and Johan Rudolf Zumsteeg. In the nineteenth century, Robert Schumann and Carl Loewe also composed ballades.

Instrumental Ballades

In the 19th century, the title was given by Frédéric Chopin to four important, large-scale piano pieces (opus numbers 23, 38, 47 and 52), the first significant application of the term to instrumental music. A number of other composers subsequently used the title for piano pieces, including Johannes Brahms (the third of his "Klavierstücke" opus 118, and the set of four opus 10), Edvard Grieg (Ballade in the Form of Variations, opus 24, a set of variations), Claude Debussy, Franz Liszt (who wrote two) and Gabriel Fauré (opus 19, later arranged for piano and orchestra). Ballades for instruments other than the piano have also been written. In the 20th Century, Frank Martin wrote 6 ballades for instruments such as the cello, viola and flute.

ee also

*List of ballades by Guillaume de Machaut
*List of compositions by Frédéric Chopin