Since the time of their original publication, Chopin's ballades have been subject to a variety of narrative interpretations. Some of these emerged already during Chopin's lifetime; most proliferated during the early twentieth century. This tendency to attempt a ‘translation’ of these pieces is not surprising: since Chopin's rather enigmatic title ‘ballade’ suggests an association with a literary work, but offers no other hints as to what that association might be. His audiences have thus sought to interpret it for themselves. As early as 1841, in his well-known review in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Footnote 1 Robert Schumann made a connection between Chopin's ballades and the works of Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, that was to shape future narrative readings of Chopin's ballades. While other Polish poets, including Chopin's friends Stefan Witwicki and Antoni Edward Odyniec, produced collections of ballads during the mid-1820s, narrative interpretations of the ballades invariably invoke Mickiewicz's works in this genre.Footnote 2 The position of Mickiewicz's ballads as a locus of this tradition is due not only to Schumann's reference, but also to their iconic status (upon their publication in 1822 Ballady i romanse Footnote 3 became the focal point of early literary Romanticism in Poland), and to the fact that, unlike the other poets, Mickiewicz was well known to non-Polish speakers, through his lectures at the Collège de France (1840–44) and the numerous translations of his works (some were translated into French as early as 1833).Footnote 4

A narrative analysis of Chopin's Second Ballade, op. 38, is the centrepiece of Jonathan Bellman's newest book, Chopin's Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom, but the author stays clear of the traditional, mostly unfounded, approaches. Instead, his analysis is carefully prepared and grounded in contextual studies. In the process, Bellman takes his reader on a journey through questions concerning genre and form, topical conventions, literary and political contexts and reception history.

Chopin's Polish Ballade begins with a discussion of three main issues, which were signalled already in Schumann's 1841 review and which have continued to plague the reception of op. 38 into our times. The first question concerns the existence of an unpublished, radically different version of this piece. The second pertains to the two-key structure of this ballade, which begins in F major and remains there for five-sixths of the length of the composition, but shifts to A minor for its conclusion. The third question relates to its relationship with ‘certain poems of Mickiewicz’, as Schumann puts it. Bellman sets out to determine ‘how many versions of it there were, the identification of the true tonic, and whether the ballade is, once and for all, based on a poem by Adam Mickiewicz (and if so, which one)’ (p. 33). Bellman not only lays out these issues clearly, but also provides an exhaustive survey of reception history (spanning more than a century and a half) as it pertains to them. While many of the referenced responses to Chopin's ballades are well known, in no other place will we find them summarized so lucidly. In this clear exposition of the issues, the weaknesses of the customary explanations and the confusion surrounding the connection between the Mickiewicz ballad and the Chopin ballade become apparent.

In the following chapters Bellman sets out to prepare his narrative reading, in the process interrogating numerous other aspects of op. 38. The first step is an introduction to narrative genres that existed on the boundary between art and popular music. Characterized by their episodic structure, these genres used easily recognizable topoi. Musical scores of these works often included verbal instructions identifying the events depicted by the music, thus reinforcing the presence of extra-musical narratives. My research shows that during the years between 1817 and 1833 the Hofmeister and Whistling catalogues list some 30 characteristic pieces of this sort and another 40 pieces in the characteristic fantasy genre.Footnote 5 These narrative compositions typically represented the élégie or bataille types. The latter became particularly popular during the Napoleonic wars, where they were often used to commemorate the final battles of that conflict. Though mostly destined for amateur audiences, these pieces were often written by prominent composers of the time. Today the best remembered of them (though invariably with some embarrassment) is Beethoven's Wellington's Victory or the Battle of Vittoria, op. 91. Bellman draws attention to these commercial genres, through a discussion of narrative piano pieces by Daniel Steibelt, Jan Ladislav Dussek, Franz Kotzwara, and Chopin's Warsaw mentor, Václav Vilém Würfel. Würfel's piece is representative of a whole genre of narrative works that were composed in response to the Polish military campaigns of the early nineteenth century. During the November Uprising of 1830–31, in particular, the Polish market was inundated with musical publications on national tunes and addressing national topics. It is reasonable to expect that Chopin was familiar with at least some of these compositions.

The interlude (Chapter 3) focuses on the First Ballade, op. 23. Bellman's discussion of the First Ballade is both illuminating and necessary, since it explains the generic and formal precedent without which op. 38 cannot be fully understood. Given the frequent nineteenth-century references linking op. 23 with Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod, Bellman maps the poetic narrative onto Chopin's ballade. His intention here is to give a sense how these nineteenth-century listeners were hearing the Mickiewicz's narrative in Chopin's music.

When he returns to op. 38, Bellman continues to interrogate its context, genre and form. In the scholarly literature, Chopin's ballades are often considered sonata movements of sorts. Earlier scholars’ desire to discuss the Polish composer's single-movement compositions in terms of sonata form likely grew out of the need to remedy the unstable position that his œuvre occupied within the canon of Western music after his death. The reception of Chopin's music in the second half of the nineteenth century was burdened by his choice of solo piano as the primary medium for his compositions. This was further impacted by the absence of the ‘master’ genres of opera and symphony, and the paucity of large compositions in general among his works. Moreover, Chopin's detractors emphasized his predilection for virtuoso and salon genres: mazurkas and waltzes in particular. By the early twentieth century, his devotees set out to shore up his position as a canonic composer, first in the German-language studies of Hugo Leichtentritt and Heinrich Schenker (both culturally affiliated with Poland – Leichtentritt was born near Poznań; Schenker near Lwów), followed by numerous Polish scholars led by Adolf Chyliński. This meant removing Chopin from the salon and virtuoso traditions and grounding him in the German analytical discourse. Thus, his supporters downplayed the narrative qualities of his works, in favour of expounding on sonata form and emphasizing organicist features of his compositions. However, while recapitulatory elements are very strong in all the ballades, their structures fit uneasily into the sonata form template.

The problems arising from analysis of the ballades as sonata movements have been explored in the excellent studies of Chopin's ballades by Jim SamsonFootnote 6 and James Parakilas.Footnote 7 Parakilas's book, in particular, offers a persuasive alternative to viewing the ballades as defective sonata movements. He proposes that the organizational principle behind these works is the ballade process, in which the episodic structure, the lingering and leaping pace, the bardic opening signalling the presence of a narrator, and a conclusion that has a character of a ‘reckoning’ (a tragic resolution to events set into motion by a moral transgression) are all derived from generic characteristics of literary and folk ballads. Bellman summarizes Parakilas's ideas about the ballade genre and form and then moves on to explore the connection between operatic ballades and Chopin's compositions, relying to a great degree on the work of David Kasunic.Footnote 8 It is the topoi commonly found in these pieces, along with those recurring in the amateur narrative piano works, that provide the vocabulary for his analysis of op. 38.

Bellman's narrative analysis of the Second Ballade relies on ‘identifying topics and styles in the Ratnerian sense’ (p. 33).Footnote 9 Moreover, it is carefully grounded in an understanding of Polish historical circumstances and the prevailing émigré narratives that stemmed from them.Footnote 10 He eschews the customary (though much later) connections to specific ballads of Mickiewicz, instead taking seriously a reading by a French contemporary and acquaintance, of Chopin's, Félicien Mallefille,Footnote 11 which received attention from Karol Berger, in an article contextualizing the First Ballade within the intellectual climate of the Polish émigré circles in Paris during the 1830s.Footnote 12 Mallefille's dramaticized hearing of Chopin's ballade and Mickiewicz's two Parisian-period works, Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego Footnote 13 and Pan Tadeusz,Footnote 14 along with topical analysis and contextual cues, lead Bellman to read op. 38 as a narrative of national martyrdom – hence the title of the book. Such a reading of this ballade was suggested a decade ago by Dorota Zakrzewska, and it is here that one would want Bellman to engage in a dialogue with Zakrzewska's perceptive reading: what elements of her interpretation does he find persuasive; what needs to be expanded on; what aspects of her approach need correction?Footnote 15 Clearly Bellman's interpretation takes us further: not only does his book provide a much broader context for his narrative reading but he alone relates Chopin's narrative of the Second Ballade specifically to Jankiel's Concert – the centrepiece of Mickiewicz's epic poem Pan Tadeusz of 1834. In his musical improvisation Jankiel, a Jewish innkeeper, Polish patriot and dulcimer virtuoso, narrates the recent history of Poland. Bellman notes that the topoi of Jankiel's improvised narrative can be understood in terms of the commercial music-narrative genres and even provides an outline of such a fictitious composition (p. 131). Finally, he sets out to show how the topoi employed in Jankiel's musical narrative and its overall dramatic trajectory translate well to op. 38. Bellman pulls together all the clues he gathered from his generic, literary, political and narrative explorations, to posit the theory that Chopin's composition was not inspired by a specific ballad of Mickiewicz, but rather that more generally ‘the Second Ballade can be heard to reflect much of Mickiewicz's anguish about the Polish Pilgrims’ (p. 172).

Having addressed the relationship between Chopin's and Mickiewicz's works, the author returns again to the remaining two questions that have troubled the reception of this piece: the second version and the tonic key. He arrives at the conclusion that the opening siciliano (bars 1–46) is what Chopin's contemporaries denoted as the other version, that Chopin performed this version in public, and that this version belongs to the salon ballade tradition (as opposed to the narrative ballade, the genre of the published version). The peculiarity concerning the shift away from the tonic F major key, Bellman asserts, arises from the narrative meaning of the ballade: ‘It is a tragic narrative, a story incompatible with a happy ending and a return to the tonic’ (p. 171). While discussing the question of the key he also revisits the debate concerning the ballade's form: like the unusual key plan, the musical form reflects the narrative, and although the final return is denied, the design of the piece is still perfectly coherent.

Jonathan Bellman's brilliantly written study brings together existing scholarship on Chopin's op. 38 and the newest contextual studies to provide a foundation for his persuasive topical analysis of this work. It is a splendid example of how one can spin a web of multiple scholarly explorations around a single musical composition. Bellman's prose is lucid and engaging, his arguments are carefully structured, and his discussions of the music insightful. He brings together the strengths of an excellent writer (after all, he is the author of A Short Guide to Writing About Music)Footnote 16, skilled scholar, and performing pianist. This book is destined to become essential reading for every scholar of nineteenth-century narrative genres and every pianist and piano enthusiast seeking a deeper contextual understanding of Chopin's ballades.