4 Ballades

In February 1854, in a bid to take his own life, Robert Schumann jumped from a bridge in Düsseldorf into the waters of the Rhine. He survived—and so began the last years of his short life in a mental health facility. It was during this period that his friend Brahms would become a huge emotional support to Robert’s wife, the composer and pianist Clara Schumann. Written during the summer of 1854, when Brahms’ feelings for Clara were deepening, the Op. 10 Ballades draw on the literary tradition of ballad poetry, which were often based on mythological themes. The first is written after the Scottish ballad Edward, published in 1765, in which we hear the traumatised revelations of a medieval knight, who has returned home to his questioning mother with blood on his sword. (Hear how Brahms uses the open fifths and octaves to evoke a sense of mythological past.) Gradually, Edward is led to confess to the murder of his father—only to then reveal that it was committed at his mother’s behest. (Brahms would go on to set the same text in his Op. 75, No. 1 duet for tenor and bass with piano.) The First Ballade can be experienced as a tone poem for piano from a composer who was being hailed a master of "absolute music", but Brahms by no means attempts a strict telling of the tale here. In any case, no such references exist in the three ballades that follow—although we are offered an echo of Schumann’s style in the final piece, where the opening melody is heard over descending broken chords.