The first ballade, Op. 23, in G minor, was published in June, 1836,
perhaps written a year or two earlier. It was suggested by and is
founded upon one of the most able and forceful, as well as extended,
patriotic historical poems by Mickiewicz, often called the Lithuanian
Epic, entitled “Konrad Wallenrod,” and published in 1828. The following
is a brief synopsis of its plot:
During the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Red Cross knights,
a powerful religious, political, and military order, controlling large
dominions on the Baltic, in territory now included in modern Russia,
were at fierce feud with Lithuania, then an independent principality,
later united with Poland by a marriage of its reigning prince, Jagiello,
to the heiress of the Polish throne, thus founding the dynasty of the
Jagiellos, the most illustrious of the royal houses of Poland. Long and
desperate was the struggle. The Lithuanians, though vastly outnumbered
and frequently outgeneraled and defeated, defended every inch of their
beloved fatherland, now absorbed in western Russia, with heroic valor.
At last their ruling prince and idolized leader fell in battle, their
army was routed and cut to pieces, the scanty remnant taking refuge from
their merciless pursuers among the fastnesses of the mountains; and the
country was for a time practically subjugated and forced to submit to
the most cruel and tyrannical oppression. The conquerors, being
Crusaders and Christian knights, considered every species of atrocious
spoliation and barbaric violence, when practised against the infidel
Lithuanians, as justifiable, even laudable, and for some years the
sufferings of the conquered knew no limit.
Among the prisoners taken and carried into virtual slavery by the
Teutonic Order, was the little seven-year-old son of the fallen
prince—a bright, precocious, winsome lad, who, after serving for some
time as page in the household of the grand master of the Order, so
completely won the heart of the old knight, that he adopted the boy and
educated him with his own children, in all the courtly and martial
accomplishments of the time. Years passed. Young Konrad grew in manly
power and promise, and came to be ranked among the flower of Teutonic
chivalry, first in the tourney, first in the field, and first in the
ladies’ hall. But ever at his side, as strange friend and secret
counselor, was seen the somber figure of the aged Wajdelote, or bard, a
venerable minstrel, who had come none knew whence, and, despite his
proud and gloomy bearing, had won high favor at the court by the magic
of his voice and lute. Ostensibly a wandering singer, he was in reality
a Lithuanian noble of high degree, a former friend of Konrad’s father,
the fallen prince, and stood high in the confidence of the Lithuanian
people and nobility as an able, devoted patriot. He came as an emissary
from them to find and win back their lost prince Konrad to his own true
flag and his native land. They were still hoping and fitfully struggling
to throw off the tyranny of the Red Cross knights and wanted Konrad for
their leader.
Under the cloak of his minstrelsy, the Wajdelote plied this secret
mission. With all the fiery eloquence of his poet’s genius, he wrought
upon the spirit of the young man, rousing it to duty and action, to
honor, ambition, and patriotism, to sympathy with the wrongs of his
oppressed fellow-countrymen, to vengeance for the death of his
slaughtered father, stirring its latent heroism, steeling it to
steadfast purpose. And as his influence strengthened day by day, the
open brow of the young prince grew clouded, the smile vanished from his
lips, and his sunny eyes grew deeper and darker with stern resolve.
At last the occasion came. In a foray against a band of insurgent
Lithuanians, Konrad and his mentor detached themselves from their
companions, and feigning to be taken captive, joined the forces of their
own countrymen, where they were welcomed with the wildest enthusiasm.
The two years that followed were the happiest of Konrad’s life. He threw
himself heart and soul into the fierce joy of combat for his native
land, devoting to her service all his personal courage and ability, and
all the military skill so carefully acquired at the court and camp of
the Red Cross knights; yet found time in the brief pauses of activity to
woo and win as wife the fairest and truest of the Lithuanian maids. For
a time the pulses of his life throbbed with a full but fluctuating tide,
in the swift interchange of love’s delights and the thrill of gallant
deeds. Caressing whispers alternated with the clash of swords, and the
tender light of the honeymoon with the lurid gleam of the camp-fire; but
his happiness was destined to be as transient as his valor was vain. A
sterner duty, a more self-sacrificing devotion claimed him, and his
veteran mentor was still at his side to mature the plan and urge its
execution. His beloved Lithuania, enfeebled, broken, disorganized for so
long, was wholly unable to cope in open field with her powerful,
disciplined, and well-equipped antagonist. Some daring, subtle, and
far-sighted stratagem alone might save her; and such a one had formed
itself in the mind of the old minstrel. Again his eloquence rang in the
ears of Konrad, like the voice of fate, “Behold, this is to do! Thou art
the man!”
A heart-breaking farewell to his bride, and Konrad disappears utterly
from the scene for ten years; then returns irrecognizably altered in
appearance, under an assumed name, with wealth and fame and following,
acquired in wars with the Saracens of Spain. The old grand master of the
Red Cross knights is dead, and Konrad with little difficulty secures his
own election to that office; and then begins the work of vengeance. By
his absolute power as grand master, and his cunning diplomacy, he
involved the order in bitter internal dissensions, depleted its
treasury, wasted its resources, weakened its garrisons, and in every
possible way sapped its strength, and finally led the flower of its army
to complete annihilation in a winter campaign against the Lithuanians,
into whose snares and ambuscades the Red Cross knights were mercilessly
thrown by secret and preconcerted arrangement with his countrymen.
Thus by a course of treachery, which for daring, subtlety, and sustained
purpose, both in conception and execution, has hardly a parallel in
history, was accomplished what could not have been done by force. The
power of the order was effectually broken and Lithuania set free. But
Konrad’s life, as well as his happiness, paid the price of his
patriotism. His beloved bride he never saw but once again, and that only
for a moment of agonized parting through dungeon bars, just before his
execution. And it is said he never smiled from the hour when the voice
of the stern old minstrel first stirred his heart with the trumpet call
of inexorable duty, till the hour when its proud pulses were stilled
forever by the daggers of the secret tribunal. For his identity was
discovered; he was, of course, tried and condemned as a traitor to the
order, and died in disgrace by the hands of his former comrades.
Such is the story, sad but stirring, which Mickiewicz handles in his
poem, and which Chopin reëmbodied in the G minor ballade, not following
literally its successive steps, but emphasizing to his utmost its
spirit, character, and moral. I think no one ever played this
composition, or listened to it attentively, without feeling that its
mood was not of our day and land. The time it represents is the middle
ages, its scene is laid in stern and rugged Lithuania, among warlike
knights and resentful rebels, and its whole spirit is therefore medieval
and military.
It opens with a brief but scornfully defiant introduction, a call to
arms, reminding one of the first lines of that familiar address to the
Roman gladiators: “Friends, I come not here to talk; ye all do know the
story of our thraldom.” Then the first and principal theme enters,
symbolizing the forceful personality and stern mentor voice of the old
minstrel, in its somber yet resolute phrases, solemn, inflexible,
relentless as fate; telling of wrongs to be avenged, of a nation in
bondage awaiting its deliverer; of the imperative call of duty and
patriotism; and it constantly recurs all through the composition as its
leading motive, whenever, as is vividly suggested by the other
contrasting, conflicting themes and passages, continually introduced,
the young prince wavers in his purpose, deterred by doubts and
forebodings, lured by seductive temptations from pursuance of the
desperate and soul-trying venture; whenever his mind wanders, as it must
at times, to regretful memories of happier days, to the splendors of
feast and tournament, to the pomp and pride of a martial career under
the adopted flag of the order, to the blithe hunting-horns of his gay
companions in youth, and tender dreams of the first great love of his
manhood, all sacrificed to a grand but pitiless cause. He is ever
recalled to the heroic mood, to the proud but rugged path of duty, by
this mentor voice—gravely insistent, quietly determined, which will not
be gainsaid; and which finally triumphs over all other considerations.
The impetuous presto which closes the work portrays the fierce
excitement and fiery rush of conflict, the utter self-abandon that hurls
itself jubilantly into the arms of an ignominious death for a cherished
ideal; and it ends with the savage but triumphant shout of a
blood-bought victory.
This ballade, though comparatively an early work, is one of Chopin’s
most darkly grand and dramatically powerful efforts; and the subjective
personal moods of the exiled Polish patriot are voiced in its gloomy
indignation, its desperate courage, and its fierce defiance.
There is an undercurrent of political meaning in “Konrad Wallenrod,”
which fortunately escaped the notice of the Russians, who allowed its
publication at St. Petersburg, but which appeals to every native and
friend of Poland and has had no small share in making its popularity.
Lithuania in the fourteenth century, broken and crushed, represents
Poland in the nineteenth, and the tyrannical Teutonic Order stands for
Russian oppression. The Wajdelote’s recitals of the wrongs of a dear but
downtrodden land, the indignation and resentment under a foreign yoke,
and the appeal to arms for freedom and revenge, are all spoken in the
cause of Poland, and are so felt by the native reader. Konrad’s dire
vengeance on the conqueror is a picture of the secret hope of all Polish
patriots of the final overthrow and punishment of the tyrant and the
reëstablishment of Polish independence.