ABSTRACT
‘Chopin at the supreme summit of his art’, ‘the acme of his power as an artist’, ‘the crown of Chopin’s work’, ‘one of Chopin’s supreme achievements’: each of these comments bears witness to the enthusiastic critical response to Chopin’s Ballades throughout the past 150 years. The hermeneutics alluded to here shapes not only Cone’s study of Op.52 but also other recent analyses of the Ballades which attempt through theory to legitimise or universalise the listener’s subjective reactions to the music. Analytical attention in Hugo Leichtentritt’s pioneering study of Chopin’s works is focused not on emotional key-notes but on structural parameters such as form, harmony, phrase, rhythm, metre and motive. Stressing the uniqueness of the Ballade genre, which, he says, combines elements of the Lied, rondo, sonata and variation set, Leichtentritt devises numerous diagrams of harmonic and phrase structures, rebarring passages to reveal hidden metrical complexities and phrase overlappings and often addressing related performance issues.
