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. 44 If we take  internal evidence to meanmusical topics and styles and  susceptibility to such impressions toimply linguistic competence in understanding a composer s stylisticidiom these are not far-fetched glosses we are probably close to whatPerry meant, and it is an approach too rarely taken with the ballades.Theactual linking of musical features with plot happens only rarely in Perry sdiscussion, however, and he only identifies the same poems as doesHuneker.His writing is far too purple these are less analyses thanpseudo-literary effusions and what he seems to enjoy most is the lengthyretellings of the poems.42.Edward Baxter Perry, Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works (Philadelphia: TheodorePresser, 1902), 122 23.43.Nashville Globe, 25 January 1907.44.Ibid., 31.26 chopin s polish balladeThe next development in this tradition originated in 1924 but was notpublished until later; it is described in the preface to Alfred Cortot sedition of Chopin s ballades (Editions Maurice Senart, 1929).I quotefrom David Ponsonby s English translation (Editions Salabert, 1931):The interpreter would be depriving himself of one of his mostprecious resources if he did not attempt to probe beneath theexpressive magnificence of the musical language, and, in spite ofits being sufficient unto itself, there discover the secret of the im-pression which first gave birth to it.In this we feel that we shall help him by reproducing here, afterthe version provided by Laurent Ceillier [sic; Cellier]45 in his com-mentaries on our series of concerts given in 1924, the brief accountof the four poems which, according to tradition[,] suggested toChopin the conception of his immortal works.May they bring tolight the true reflection of the emotion by which these pages weredictated to the sublime musician of the soul of Poland.46Thus adducing  tradition, Cortot quotes or paraphrases Cellier to theeffect that the First Ballade is based on Konrad Wallenrod, but specificallythe one episode that Mickiewicz subtitled Ballad ( The Ballad of Alpu-hara ), a lay of Moorish Spain sung at a feast by the thoroughly inebriatedtitle character, wherein a defeated Moorish king surrenders to his Chris-tian enemies but exacts a terrible vengeance by infecting them with theplague.There seems to be no motivation beyond the word  Ballad forthis identification, because there is nothing in the music of op.23 thatidentifies it with medieval Spain or the Muslim-Christian power struggle.Cellier and Cortot assign the Second and Third Ballades the same poems asdid Huneker and Perry: op.38 is associated with Z
witez
, the story of theLithuanian virgin suicides, and op.47 with Undine (Z
witezianka), thejilted water sprite.Now, however, Chopin s Fourth Ballade is assigned apoem: Trzech Budrysów (Three Budrys), a lighthearted tale of a Lithua-nian father who sends his three sons forth for adventure, acquisition, andmanly quests, after which each returns with a bride, so the poem ends withthree weddings.(Those who know the Fourth Ballade, with its achingmelancholy and virtuosic minor-mode tempest of a closing section, willhave their own thoughts about this identification.) The capsule summariesare vague and inexact.The Cellier/Cortot identifications were further45.Laurent Cellier was the author of a book on Roger-Ducasse and editor of a collectionof Breton folk songs.46.Alfred Cortot, Chopin Ballads (Students Edition), trans.David Ponsonby (Paris:Editions Salabert, 1931), iii.two versions, two keys, and mickiewicz s poems 27disseminated in the English-speaking world by way of the 1931 edition ofChopin s letters, collected by Henryk Opieński, which has a prefatory noteby the translator, E.L.Voynich, that cites Cortot (without mentioningCellier) and expands the summaries.Meanwhile, on the Polish side, in 1926 Zdzisław Jan Jachimecki(1882 1953) published a Chopin biography (French translation by theauthor, 1930) in which he provided  descriptive analyses of the ballades,including the close linking of, now, Z
witezianka with the Second Ballade.It included his view of the work s wan closing melodic fragment as asetting of the closing words of the poem:  And who is the maiden? I knownot. (To the Third Ballade Jachimecki assigns Heinrich Heine s Lorelei,so for him the Second and Third Ballades form a kind of pair, sharing thetheme of malevolent fairies of the deep.)47 Jachimecki s conception isconsidered to have been highly influential on the interpretations of pia-nists who came after him.48 So, by 1931, specific Mickiewicz-Chopinconnections had been disseminated, in a tone of specialist knowledgeand certainty, in Polish, French, and English.Further, because of thedisagreements between Jachimecki and Cellier/Cortot and the similarityin title and content, the matter of which precise poems were to beassociated with the Second and Third Ballades was now becoming hazy.Still, a sense of mysterious yet authentic arcana came to be attached to theentire issue.It is possible that Jachimecki was swayed to associate the SecondBallade with Z
witezianka rather than Z
witez
by an earlier work, thevocal setting (1828) of the Z
witezianka poem by Maria Szymanowska,a Polish pianist and composer (and, as it happened, Mickiewicz s mother-in-law; see ex.1.4).The key is F major, the meter is 6/8, and the texturebears more than a passing resemblance to that found in the openingsection of Chopin s Second Ballade.There the relationship ends, however;Szymanowska s setting seems to be a late derivative of Blondel s romance Un fièvre brûlante from André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry s RichardCoeur-de-Lion (1784), a studiedly simple and naive (and highly influen-tial) number that evoked a kind of antique innocence, to the utter delightof Parisian audiences.Still, the superficial resemblance between the Sec-ond Ballade and an obscure Polish vocal setting of one of the two Mick-iewicz poems tradition declared it to be based upon is suggestive,particularly when there is so little else of a concrete nature and thetradition itself gives the impression of grasping at straws.47.ZdzisÅ‚aw Jachimecki, Frédéric Chopin et son S
uvre (Paris: Librairie Delagrave,1930), 131 32.48.The Web site of the Narodowy Chopin Institute in Poland, http://www.nifc.pl/chopin/persons/text/id/679/lang/en, accessed 19 February 2007.28 chopin s polish balladeEX.1.4.Maria Szymanowska,  Z
witezianka, mm.1 12 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]