Four Ballades, Op.10 (1854)

No.1 in D minor

No.2 in D major

No.3 in B minor

No.4 in B major

Although Brahms must have known Chopin’s Ballades when he wrote his own Four Ballades Op.10 in 1854, he seems to have been not in the least influenced by them - unless, that is, he took them as a challenge to create a specifically Germanic version of the form. Certainly, the first of them was inspired by a ballad in Herder’s Stimmen der Völker which, though translated from a Scots original, was already part of the German romantic tradition by virtue of vocal settings by Schubert and Loewe.

Brahms’s melodic material here is as closely related to the text of Edward as it would be if he too were setting it as a song. The Scots words fit the opening bars almost as neatly as those of Herder’s translation:

Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid? Edward, Edward!

Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, and why sae gang ye o?

“O I hae killed my hawk sae guid, O I hae killed my hawk sae guid.”

Brahms’s structure derives from Edward too, at least in the question-and-answer form of the first part. The middle section is a dramatic development of fragments of the mother’s and the son’s themes and is perhaps a reflection of the violence that results in Edward’s murder of his father. In the closing section only the mother’s voice, now drained of its colour, is recalled. Twenty-four years later, incidentally, Brahms made a setting of the same Edward ballad for vocal duet.

It is not known whether Brahms had any specific literary models for the other three Ballades. Bearing in mind the close key relationships between the four of them, it could be that he had no other intention than to write three more pieces in a similarly romantic vein to make a coherent set. It would seem, however, from the extreme contrast between the serene outer sections of Ballade No.2 in D major and the highly eventful, sometimes aggressive middle section beginning in B minor, that there must be some extra-musical background to it. Ballade No.3 is, as the heading in the score indicates, an Intermezzo, weirdly capricious in the B minor outer sections and exquisitely poetic in the bell sounds ringing from the top half of the keyboard in the middle section.

Ballade No.4 is a touching reminder that when Brahms wrote these pieces he was staying in Düsseldorf to be near Clara Schumann after her husband’s suicide attempt and his subsequent removal to the sanatorium at Endenich. If there is any extra-musical background in this case, with a tender and characteristically Schumannesque soprano melody in the opening section answered by a handsome tenor melody in the middle, it could well be an expression of the emotional dilemma Brahms found himself in at the time.