Ballade No. 1, Op. 23

A structuralist ideal has often guided music analysis, especially in its formative stages as an independent discipline. Implicit in a good deal of analysis has been the notion that structure is stable, and that it may be located in terms inherent in the work itself, unpolluted by context. This is a chimera, since analytical tools are themselves historical categories which have acquired the status of conventions. Yet the notion has somehow remained seductive. We are told by one commentator on the ballades that ‘it would be foolish to regard these pieces from the point of view of sonata movements’; and that in any case ‘the student should examine every sonata movement as though it were the first example of its kind he has ever seen’. In its way this approach is just as unhelpful as a prescriptive identification of the musical work with an abstract schema. Both positions ignore the true value of compositional norms (to both composer and listener) as one pole of a vital creative dialectic between universal and particular, collective and unique, schema and deviation. A revealing analysis is in this sense always comparative.

Far from ignoring sonata form we need to recognise it as the essential reference point for all four ballades – the ‘ideal type’ or archetype against which unique statements have been counterpointed. Other formal archetypes, notably rondo and variation form, may be invoked in particular cases, but these remain of subsidiary significance. Indeed it has already been suggested that an important motivation for the ballades was the accommodation of sonatabased structures to an idiom derived from post-classical concert repertories.