No, for all of Brahms's admiration of Chopin, his ballades really aren't much like Chopin's

Ballade is also a typeface -- or, more precisely, a font: Ballade-Bold.

ballad  n  1. a.  A narrative poem, often of folk origin and intended to be sung, consisting of simple stanzas and usually having a recurring refrain.  b.  The music for such a poem.  2.  Music  A popular song especially of a romantic or sentimental nature.

ballade  n.  1.  A verse form usually consisting of three stanzas of eight or ten lines each along with a brief envoy, with all three stanzas and the envoy ending in the same one-line refrain.  2.  Music  A composition, usually for the piano, having the romantic or dramatic quality of a ballad.

-- The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, Third Edition (1992)

A BALLADE BY CHOPIN -- No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23


Alfred Cortot, piano. Victor, recorded in New York City, Dec. 27, 1926

Josef Hofmann, piano. Live recording from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, Nov. 28, 1937

AND ONE BY BRAHMS -- in D minor, Op. 10, No. 1


Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), February 1972

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, piano. Live performance from Lugano, 1981

[Now, having heard in yesterday's pre-post ("This jolly Brahms duet really isn't part of our 'work unit,' but we kind of have to hear it about now") the vocal-duet setting Brahms did a couple of decades later of the Herder ballad that inspired this ballade, we can appreciate more fully the grimness of the setting.]

by Ken

We've been peeking at the fascinating process by which Brahms acquired mastery of musical forms. Our view of the process, we should note, is seriously hampered by the fiercely high standards the composer maintained, which caused him to destroy so much music which in his view didn't meet his standards, which he tended to think, especially when he looked back at his younger years, were rather too low than too high. So we really don't get to hear him experimenting much. What we hear are the results of experiments that he considered to have had a satisfactory outcome.

We came to this line of inquiry, for those who may still be wondering, by working backwards through Brahms's long, arduous path to the creation of a symphony, a goal he thought early on would be the achievement that really put him on the international compositional map. Luckily for him and us, he managed to fashion a rather spectacularly successful career even without managing the symphonic feat, which didn't come till his Op. 60.


WHY IS BRAHMS'S EARLIEST SURVIVING WORK HIS 'OP. 4'?

Of course it was possible for the young Brahms to be aware of Chopin's scherzos and ballades without in any way imitating them

[With assorted strategic Monday-morning touching up]

Plus, we get to have some fun with Weber's Oberon Overture
and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music (than
which musical wonderfulness doesn't come any wonderfuller)

Given Brahms's reverance for the great masters who preceded him, and in particular one who had revolutionized the way composers could think about the piano, how could he not have been keenly aware of Chopin?

"Johannes Brahms began his musical life studying the piano, and his earliest, truly great compositions were solo piano works, both presented here. The Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, is the earliest surviving composition by Brahms. He wrote it in November 1851 when he was 18 and published it as Op. 4, rather than Op. 1, because, he explained to a friend, “when one shows one's self for the first time, people must first see the head and not the feet.” Musical scholars feel that, despite the composer’s denial, it obviously shows a “dependence” on Chopin’s scherzi, and quotes from Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling at bar 46 as well."

-- from an online note accompanying a listing for Yefim Bronfman's early recording of Op. 4 (the Scherzo) and Op. 5 (the F minor Piano Sonata)

SO, HERE AGAIN IS HOW BRAHMS'S SCHERZO GOES
(in two performances we haven't heard before and one we have)

BRAHMS: Scherzo for Piano in E-flat minor, Op. 4


Yefim Bronfman, piano. MusicMasters, recorded c1986

Julius Katchen, piano. Decca, recorded in Decca Studio No. 3, West Hampstead (London), 1964

Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), March 1958

I'll have something to say about the performances farther down. For now, I suggest keeping in mind the ages of the pianists at the time of recording -- roughly 28, 38, and 62. Turns out, it seems to matter.

by Ken

In a moment we're going to hear how a Chopin scherzo goes. But first let me say that it's been a good week for me, musically and in other ways as well, I guess. (Funny how the two often go together!) After a couple of years in which it was all but impossible for me to listen to music on my aging computer, which I imagined was suffering from some likely fatal hardware or at least heart-stoppingly expensive malady whose repair would likely cost almost as much as replacing the poor old computer, well --

Long story short (I actually started writing the whole story before just chucking it, since what interest could it have for anybody but me?), like magic I managed to solve all the problems, and then some, and suddenly I found myself with wonderful music pouring forth from both my computers. It used to be that even when I was most depressed about the purposelessness of these posts, the music revived me. So lately I've been allowing myself to wallow a bit in the pleasure of all this music, and later in this post we're going to allow it ourselves the luxury of some pleasurable musical wallowing.


NOW HERE'S HOW A CHOPIN SCHERZO GOES
(via a Czech, a Hungarian, and of course the Pole -- thrice over!)

Let's take a moment to meet and greet Brahms the musical poet

"When I listen, in my home, to this music played on a fine gramophone, I feel I receive the full impact the original listeners might have felt. In that atmosphere -- quietly listening alone, or with a person close to you -- they take your heart."

-- a special guest commentator who'll be sharing "his" Brahms with us

BRAHMS (AS WE MIGHT SAY) "DOES SCHERZO"

Scherzo for Piano in E-flat minor, Op. 4

Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), March 1958

by Ken

The above, in case you haven't guessed, is our mystery piece and pianist from last Sunday's "sneak preview of what I'm working on": the work that was identified as "Solo-piano work that comes before Op. 5," which is to say the 21-year-old Brahms's breakthrough work, the mighty and exalted Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, as performed by "Some kind of keyboard magician (don't you think?)" -- and on second hearing don't you still think? There's a tendency to think of Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991), even while ostensibly appreciating him, as a stalwart upholder of the grand Austro-Germanic Classical and Romantic tradition, which he assuredly was. Yet I often feel that this was just the most visible surface of his playing, that there was almost always something else going on, a free -- disciplined, yes, but still free -- range of imagination that he didn't adverise or flaunt but that could create not just musical intimacy but musical magic, often in standard repertory -- like many of the Beethoven piano sonatas -- where most pianists don't even know it's hiding.

I think we should really try to take in the whole of the F minor Sonata ("the whole" encompassing in this case not three or even four but five movements), but I'm not ready for that. Instead, for now we're going to jump over Op. 5 all the way to Op. 10, the set of Four Ballades that Brahms composed in 1854 -- in other words, early on in the period we're interested: 1854-58, the years when he got his new idea for the growing mass of musical material he had been developing, after transforming it from an incipient sonata for two pianos into something he thought could instead be developed into the symphony he so dearly wanted to write, and now instead was imagining as a big and bold piano concerto, which would occupy him until 1858 and not achieve performance in even preliminary form until 1859.

If these two forms, "scherzo" and "ballade," call to mind another great composer for the piano, one who may have brought to composition for the piano a higher-soaring poetic imagination than any other composer of the 19th -- or any other -- century, who happened to have wound up creating four each of these forms, scherzos and ballades, that's fine by me. It could be that this composer by sheerest chance happened also to have been in large measure a "discovery" of Robert Schumann, who was already providing Brahms with the inspiration of a composer centrally concerned with combining fluency in the Classical forms, with at the same time a grounding in the free flight of poetic imagination. Brahms would certainly have been keenly aware of this great predecessor, and all the music of his he laid hands on while the predecessor was still alive and composing up a storm until his always-fragile health gave way in 1849, when he was 39 and Brahms 16, achieving growing mastery of the piano and imagining himself as a composer.

It's not that Brahms's idea of a piano scherzo (and here we're thinking of "scherzo" not as a movement of a symphony or string quartet or other work in what we think of as "sonata form," even a piano sonata as a free-standing piano form rather than the scherzo movement of a symphony or string quartet or even piano sonata) or ballade is much like that predecessor's. Still, the fact that he gravitated to these forms, and in them let his imagination run free through subjects of human time and place and situation and mood, I don't see how any of this could have been an accident.

I don't think we often think of Brahms as, particularly, a font of supreme poetic imagination in music, but in the course of some random listening I was doing while pondering Brahms for our current project, I happened to hear the very recording we're going to be listening to in just a moment, and I was bowled over even more than I was by the Wilhelm Kempff recording of the Scherzo in E minor, with its magical range of touches and variously-breathed musical traceries. We're going to talk and learn a bit more about the construction of the Ballades, but first I'm proposing that we just listen to Kempff ensorcel his way through the Brahms Ballades. And once he's through them, I think we'll be primed for the appearance of a special guest commentator who's going to share some of the secrets of his lifelong love affair with Brahms's piano music, whom we're first going to hear play the Ballades.

BRAHMS: Ballades (4), Op. 10:
i. After the Scottish ballad: "Edward" in Herder's "Voices of the People" (Andante)
ii. Andante
iii. Intermezzo: Allegro
iv. Andante con moto

[ii. at 3:44; iii. at 10:06; iv. at 14:18] Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), February 1972

[ii. at 4:01; iii. at 9:52; iv. at 13:53] Our special guest commentator, piano. (Recording details to come later)


NOW LET'S MEET OUR SPECIAL GUEST BRAHMS-LOVER

A vision for the future in Beethoven's last piano sonata

Beethoven's last piano sonata, No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111

In this May 1936 Electrola recording of Op. 111, that great Beethovenian Elly Ney (1882-1968) plays the Maestoso introduction and the exposition of the main Allegro (which is marked for a repeat that we're not hearing).

by Ken

Angry? Defiant? Just powerfully assertive? And yet there's something else going on at the same time, almost at war with those violent outbursts. I tried to find an earlier stopping point, and just couldn't -- I took it right up to the repeat marking. (It's only the Allegro section that gets repeated.)

In Friday night's preview we heard what I think are extraordinary -- as well as extraordinarily different -- performances of Beethoven's first piano sonata, the F minor, Op. 2, No. 1 (a set of three sonatas, like the set of three piano trios that makes up Beethoven's Op. 1), by Artur Schnabel and Glenn Gould. That was in preparation for today's look at the last of the 32 sonatas -- again one of three sonatas written consecutively, and probably overlappingly: Beethoven's Opp. 109, 110, and 111, astonishingly different musical visions that are almost textbook specimens of the composer's haunted and visionary "late" period.

It came about because I was thinking ahead to a recital I eventually attended Thursday night at which a young Korean pianist played Op. 111 and all four of Chopin's ballades. I wasn't sure how the two would go together. It's not a huge amount of music quantity-wise -- figure something under 30 minutes for the Beethoven sonata and maybe 35-40 for the combined Chopin ballades -- but golly, if you want to talk quality! (In the event, after all our talk about piano encores, there weren't any!)

I didn't know going in whether we would be hearing the Beethoven or Chopin first, and was sort of thinking if it was me, maybe I would start with the Chopin. So I thought we might listen to the second of the Chopin ballades, first a lovely performance by Agustin Anievas, then a more searching performance by Sviatoslav Richter (from the same Prague broadcast from which we recently heard the First Ballade).

CHOPIN: Ballade No. 2 in F, Op. 38


Agustin Anievas, piano. EMI, recorded in London, June 1975

Sviatoslav Richter, piano. Praga, recorded live in Prague, Feb. 21, 1960


TO PROCEED WITH BEETHOVEN'S OP. 111 . . .