Ballade in F sharp major Op.19 (1877-79)

Fauré’s Ballade is a work not only of extraordinary technical extravagance – such that even Liszt declared himself unable to play it – but also of remarkable structural originality. There has been surprisingly little comment on the latter quality. Alfred Cortot refers in La musique française de piano    to the “secret logic” of its modulations and its development while evidently finding nothing anomalous in a single-movement construction which begins with a melody apparently intended as the main theme but which, after treating it as such for the the first five of its fifteen minutes, drops it never to recall it again.

It is all the more anomalous that, when that shapely melody makes its first entry over F sharp major arpeggios in the opening Andante cantabile section, Fauré seem to be modelling himself on Chopin, though with his own distinctive harmonies and his own kind of keyboard elaboration. But then Chopin would not have ended the opening section with a risky succession of three tonic chords and a pause, as Fauré does here before introducing a second theme in the new key of E flat minor in a new Allegro moderato tempo. The first theme is not forgotten at this point: it re-appears in counterpoint with the second theme in textures of such complexity that they might well have been the cause of Liszt’s complaint that he didn’t have enough fingers (and his advice to the young composer to arrange the work for piano and orchestra – which in 1881 he did). The re-entry of the first theme on a fortissimo climax is, however, its last.

At this point, as the tempo slows to Andante, the work changes direction. A new theme gradually establishes itself, its first two bars repeated between bravura arpeggios on a rising tempo until it emerges in its definitive form, as a short but exquisitely lyrical rocking melody in F sharp major, prettily decorated by trills and arpeggios. Although the second theme still has a prominent part to play, it is this new one that, always preserving its rocking rhythms, motivates the increasingly ecstatic last section of the work in an inspired series of transformations. Its ultimate elaboration, in lavishly applied birdsong trills and gruppettos, is convincing evidence that when the composer said he was thinking of the “forest murmurs” from Siegfried he meant it.