Narrative Without Words: The Story of Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23

Written by Joseph John L. Verallo  |  September 5, 2025

I’d first heard Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 when watching Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). In perhaps the film’s most memorable scene, the Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman (played by Adrien Brody) is rummaging through an abandoned home in war-torn Warsaw during World War II. A sympathetic German soldier discovers Szpilman in the night. Rather than arrest him, however, he asks the pianist to play on the home’s dusty piano. Szpilman then proceeds to play Chopin’s iconic Ballade.

The scene removes much of the piece to shorten it for theatrical reasons. When you listen to it in full length, you begin to understand why. Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 is a masterwork of musical narrative that would’ve pulled the audience away from the film’s own narrative had it run its whole course. Indeed, the name of the form borrows from poetry’s “ballad,” a generally long narrative verse.

Unlike a poem, Chopin’s Ballade contains no words to give the work a stable meaning. Since the early 20th century, music critics have emphasized a connection between this piece and the poetry of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Musicologist Michael Klein notes this as an attempt to “find the missing text” of Chopin’s Ballade within the words of Mickiewicz. This effort to find hidden words within the tones of the piano is a testament to just how narratively rich the G minor Ballade is despite its lack of text.
Recent developments in literary and narrative studies have sought to shift the definition of “narrative” from an emphasis on plot to a focus on experience. It is our experience of something living, something human, in a work that makes it a narrative. Where else can we find this unequivocal humanity but in Chopin’s G minor Ballade?

The piece expresses a vast range of emotions, from grief to sentimentality to ecstasy to despair. It has such a multitude of things to let out that it decides to start it all with an ambiguity, almost as if to say, “I do not know where to begin.” This ambiguity takes the form of a two C’s in the lower register that unfurl into a broken A-flat chord, which makes its way to the piece’s first theme in G minor.

The first theme is a waltz-like melody that elicits an experience so “corporeal” that it, as composer and musicologist Lawrence Kramer notes, “asserts the presence of a narrative voice.” Thus, we unconsciously imagine the theme to represent our poetic hero. The music is reminiscing but also conveys uncertainty, implying that our hero is seeking something. But with each repetition of the opening motif, it seems as if what he seeks only falls further away.

This uncertainty never settles, and the music descends into a series of agitated arpeggios before miraculously finding its way into one of music’s most beloved melodies. The Ballade’s second theme in E-flat is a reverie of sound and splendor. It serves as the pinnacle of romantic beauty, a moment of repose—perhaps even ecstasy—for the poetic hero.

But the tragedy of beauty is that it is fleeting, and no one captures this better than Chopin. Reluctantly, the music returns to its first theme like a dreamer awakened once more into the bleakness of reality. Unlike in the beginning, things only descend further and further into agitation before finally entering into chaotic melancholy, the piece’s coda. The renowned pianist Garrick Ohlsson calls this Chopin’s signature “sadism,” describing the composer’s tendency to place his most technically and emotionally demanding passages toward a piece’s end. The coda’s bedlam of chords and chromatic scales evidently depicts our hero’s anguish, concluded by a final set of descending octaves that signals a final plunge into despair.

The Ballade’s sound is so rich that it transcends mere music and enters into the realm of literature. Klein writes: “If a ballad is a musical poem without music, then a Chopin ballade is a poetic music without poetry.” Each musical section is so distinct from the rest that each constitutes its own scene. We can see an evident rise of action, climax, and denouement, as we, listeners, are enticed into the music’s vivid but wordless storytelling.

Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 is a measure of artistry. Studying it serves almost as a rite of passage for determined piano students. By no means is it the only one, nor did Chopin only compose this G minor Ballade, but three others.

You may purchase all four of Chopin’s Ballades bound in one expertly edited Urtext edition here.