Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 — the first time the name of a sung story was given to a piece for piano alone. 264 bars and 8:49: seven slow opening bars like someone clearing their throat, two quite different tunes returning in turn, and a final minute or so that reaches the densest writing in the piece. The full score is on screen, note by note.
He took a word for singing and gave it to instrumental music
Before Chopin, a ballade was a song that told a story — words, a plot, verse after verse. Applying the word to a piano piece with no words at all starts here. Written around 1835 and published in 1836, it is dedicated to Baron von Stockhausen, the Hanoverian envoy in Paris. Three more followed, and the four became a genre; Liszt, Brahms and Fauré all later wrote ballades of their own.
Why a new name? Because this kind of piece has no fixed pattern the way a waltz or a nocturne does. It sets out from a quiet opening, passes through several characters, comes back altered, and drives to an ending it does not return from. That is how a story moves, not how a dance or a song moves.
As for the story itself, there is no settled answer. Schumann recorded that Chopin had mentioned the Polish poet Mickiewicz to him, and later writers have paired the four ballades with Mickiewicz's four narrative poems. Chopin never said which went with which, and the score carries no title or note of any kind. That is a reported remark, not a verifiable fact — what the piece is about is for the listener to decide.
A film, an Olympic short program and an anime finale all used it
This is the ballade played for the German officer in the 2002 film The Pianist — though by Szpilman's own account it was the Nocturne in C-sharp minor that day.
Yuzuru Hanyu skated his short program to it from 2014 to 2020, and Your Lie in April closes with Ysaÿe's violin-and-piano version.
Two tunes, and neither comes back as it was
The first seven bars are a single sentence: both hands climb together and stop on a chord left hanging. They are slow enough to sound like someone clearing their throat before speaking.
The first tune enters at bar 8, swaying in threes, very quiet and always sinking, as if talking to itself. It repeats, circles back, presses forward around the two-minute mark, and grows uneasy.
Around two minutes forty someone else speaks — slower, marked to be played in an undertone, a completely different melody, brighter than the first and rising.
The two tunes then alternate, each return more agitated than the last: the first sinks further, the second grows louder, and a little after five forty the second comes back at its most expansive.
After seven minutes forty comes the coda, the fiercest stretch in the piece. The rhythm turns into continuous rushing figures, both hands running up and down, the range stretched to its widest, and it does not stop until the final chords land.
The dynamic range is enormous — the quiet places are barely audible and the loud ones will startle you. It is a piece to sit down and hear from beginning to end.
Two hundred and sixty-four bars, the last fifty-seven written differently
264 bars and 5,115 key strikes (not counting the 97 notes tied over rather than struck again), with no repeats.
The bar-by-bar note counts mark the structure. Up to bar 7 there are 4 to 16 notes a bar — the density of an introduction. From bar 8 the first tune mostly sits at 16 to 20 a bar.
From bar 68 the count actually drops to around 10 a bar: the second tune comes in softly over a few chords.
Through the middle the two tunes take turns and the count moves mostly between 16 and 28.
After bar 208 the page changes character: the metre becomes 2/2, the median note length falls from 0.32 seconds in the first tune to 0.15, and the last runs pack 40 or 50 notes into a bar. That is the coda, the densest 57 bars in the piece.
The range runs from D1 to F7, over 6 octaves, the top F7 reached four times; the shortest notes are a few grace notes at 0.032 seconds.
The difficulty is making nine minutes into one thing
First, a sense of structure. This runs close to nine minutes and both tunes return several times; treat every return with the same weight and speed and it sounds like one passage on loop. Each return needs a little more than the last, so that the ending has somewhere to arrive.
Second, those first seven bars. They are slow, sparse, and every note is exposed, so any unevenness is audible. They are the easiest part to underrate and the hardest to play well.
Third, the coda. After bar 208 the task is not speed but order — the hands run in opposite directions and the densest second carries 34 notes. Fix the hand shapes and fingering first, then build it up slowly, pass by pass.
Fourth, the pedal. This source marks three hundred and fifty-six pedal spans; a full pedal in the quiet sections lets the bass blur the melody above it, while too little in the dense ones turns the passage into unresonant hammering.
The first edition prints only Largo at the start and Moderato at bar 8, with no metronome figure; this version follows the transcriber's own tempo shading from 68 to the quarter at the opening, so the difference between introduction and coda survives.
We rate this 5 out of 5.
The other three ballades, and his other large pieces
Of the four ballades, No. 2 in F major, Op. 38, and No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52, are on this channel too; No. 3 in A-flat major, Op. 47, is still to come.
For something of comparable scale by the same composer, the Heroic Polonaise, Op. 53, is on this channel and could hardly be more different — that one holds its head high throughout, while this one travels from quiet to out of control. For the quiet side, the Nocturnes Op. 9 No. 2 and Op. 27 No. 2 are both here too.
