Ballade No.2

Description

The second of Liszt's two ballades, written in 1853. Some twenty years after Chopin brought the title into piano music, Liszt took it over and wrote a piece with a still more explicit narrative gesture. A connection with the myth of Hero and Leander is sometimes proposed, but the composer left no programme.

In B minor, it opens with a sinister figure crawling chromatically up the bass, and the tension accumulates with each repetition. Against it a contrasting, singing theme appears. The two alternate on an ever larger scale until, late in the work, the music turns to the major and rises to a radiant summit. It uses seven octaves and close to 7,000 notes.

It is a large work even among advanced pieces, with continuous octaves, wide leaps and thick chords distributed throughout. Getting through the difficulties is not enough to give it shape: how sinister the returning bass figure can be kept, and how sharply the singing theme can be set against it, is what makes the piece work as a story.

A genre Chopin pioneered — large-scale solo piano works with a narrative, epic quality.