i. Andante, after the Scottish ballad ‘Edward’
ii. Andante, espressivo e dolce – Allegro non troppo
iii. Intermezzo. Allegro
iv. Andante con moto
Brahms composed this set of four Ballades in Düsseldorf in 1854 (when he was 20), at a time when Robert and Clara Schumann were promoting the young Brahms’s career. The poetic ballad on which the musical form was based involved a verse narrative with refrains. Chopin’s famous group of Ballades had been written between 1831 and 1842 and treated this idea very freely. As Charles Rosen has pointed out, Brahms was more faithful to the medieval origins of the poetic form, describing his approach as ‘more thoroughly neo-Gothic’. The four Ballades are in two pairs, linked by related keys. The first two are in D minor and D major, while the third and fourth are in B minor and B major. The first Ballade was directly inspired by an ancient Scottish ballad that had been published in German by the poet Johann Gottfried Herder. It is a gruesome tale of Edward’s sword dripping with the blood of his father and ending with him cursing his mother, though Brahms’s piece – although stormy and passionate in the middle section – does not really evoke the mood of the poem. Instead, there’s a sense of its formal qualities and its symmetry. The second Ballade begins slowly, but the main Allegro non troppo section is dramatic, dominated by an obsessive rhythm of four quavers that returns later to provide a kind of ghostly knocking. The third Ballade is headed ‘Intermezzo’ and it is a Scherzo-like piece in B minor, with a central Trio section that introduces an ethereal idea in F sharp major. The final Ballade begins as sweeping triple-time movement, but Brahms introduces a remarkable contrasting idea, with a marking worthy of late Beethoven: Più lento. Col intimissimo sentimento, ma senza troppo marcare la melodia (Slower. With most intimate feeling, but without heavily marking the melody)