"A less artistic work than the first,"
he wrote, "but equally fantastic and intellectual. Its
impassioned episodes seem to have been afterward inserted. I
recollect very well that when Chopin played this Ballade for me
it finished in F major; it now closes in A minor." Willeby gives
its key as F minor. It is really in the keys of F major--A minor.
Chopin's psychology was seldom at fault. A major ending would
have crushed this extraordinary tone-poem, written, Chopin
admits, under the direct inspiration of Adam Mickiewicz's "Le Lac
de Willis." Willeby accepts Schumann's dictum of the inferiority
of this Ballade to its predecessor. Niecks does not. Niecks is
quite justified in asking how "two such wholly dissimilar things
can be compared and weighed in this fashion."
In truth they cannot. "The second Ballade possesses beauties in
no way inferior to those of the first," he continues. "What can
be finer than the simple strains of the opening section! They
sound as if they had been drawn from the people's store-house of
song. The entrance of the presto surprises, and seems out of
keeping with what precedes; but what we hear after the return of
tempo primo--the development of those simple strains, or rather
the cogitations on them--justifies the presence of the presto.
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