Today’s piece is the Ballade in G minor op. 24 by Edvard Grieg. Grieg is most famous to pianists for his delightful smaller miniatures, such as the lyric pieces—but he also wrote some impressive larger scale works including a piano sonata, the famous piano concerto, and of course this ballade.
Structured as a set of 9 variations plus coda on a Norwegian folk theme, this work seems to cover the full gamut of emotions from despair to joy. It was written during a particularly trying time in the composer’s life as he was coping with the death of his parents, and he composed nothing else following this work for some time.
If you are more used to the reliance on smaller forms which is the norm in popular forms, large scale works like this one and others that I will post may seem counterintuitive. It might seem odd that a piece of music could last for (in this case) 20 minutes and not lose interest.
The comparison I always use is between short stories and a novel—both are deserving of interest, have different effects, and require a different mental approach to write successfully. Novels are generally deemed to be more difficult to create, and it becomes particularly difficult when you are writing a long piece of music, in which you have to rely on sounds alone, with no words or images to sustain interest!
Composers instead use internal justifications to make large scale forms work: the way they organize themes and sections creates a kind of musical “story” which draws us along emotionally. To my mind, this kind of story is the most compelling of all the stories that human’s invent—since it involves music, which evokes our most immediate emotional reactions.
In future posts, I will elaborate more on the underlying logic behind the most beautiful large-scale musical works.