Chopin's Second Ballade, op. 38, composed in the late 1830s and published in 1840, is a well‐known yet poorly understood work. Not only was the piece rumored to exist in an alternate version and to derive—somehow—from the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, there has even been disagreement on matters as basic as tonic key, form, and narrative content. The ballade is generally understood to relate in some way to Poland's increasingly precarious political status in the early nineteenth century and Russia's eradication of the last vestiges of Polish independence in 1831—turmoil that affected Chopin deeply ... More

Chopin's Second Ballade, op. 38, composed in the late 1830s and published in 1840, is a well‐known yet poorly understood work. Not only was the piece rumored to exist in an alternate version and to derive—somehow—from the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, there has even been disagreement on matters as basic as tonic key, form, and narrative content. The ballade is generally understood to relate in some way to Poland's increasingly precarious political status in the early nineteenth century and Russia's eradication of the last vestiges of Polish independence in 1831—turmoil that affected Chopin deeply on both the personal and the political levels. Discussions of the work's compositional strategies have tended to rely on the sonata‐allegro model and its contemporary variants, but these have not proven very fruitful. Instead, the formal and stylistic antecedents for the Second Ballade are to be found in the operatic repertoire, where a ballade tradition had been developing since the 1820s, and in the amateur piano repertoire, where narrative and depictive works had been a thriving genre for decades. A close examination of the Second Ballade reveals it to be a work more closely linked to the music of its time than has previously been realized: referencing well‐known operatic music and drawing on the repertoires and stock gestures of contemporary middlebrow music, it tells a story of Polish national martyrdom in a way understood by certain of Chopin's contemporaries but by virtually no one since. Reexamined in this light, the Second Ballade proves revelatory regarding both the composer's compositional aesthetic and the way his music engaged the wider culture.