This is the best known, the most played, and most popular of all the
Chopin ballades. Its warm, lyric opening theme, its strikingly original
rhythmic effects, its piquant, bewitching second subject, full of
playful grace, as well as its magnificently developed climax, one of the
finest in the piano literature, have all endeared it to the hearts of
Chopin lovers and rendered it one of the most effective of concert
solos.
Like the second ballade in F major, this composition is founded upon an
ancient legend of Lake Switez, which seems to be a center about which
cluster many of the Lithuanian myths. The one in question had been
previously treated by Chopin’s friend and compatriot, Adam Mickiewicz,
in the form of a ballad in Polish verse, and the substance of the story,
briefly and simply told, is as follows:
A young and fearless knight, whose ancestral castle crowned a
forest-covered eminence above the beautiful blue lake, was wont to
wander on its lone and wooded shores at evening and to meet there
clandestinely his radiant, beautiful, mysterious lady-love, whose name,
home, and origin he was unable to discover, and which she persistently
refused to disclose. She always appeared to him suddenly, without
warning or visible approach, as if born anew each night of the filtering
moonlight and shifting forest shadows, or as if drawing her ethereal
substance at will from the floating mist wreaths above the lake. And she
vanished as miraculously, when she chose to end their interview,
dissolving from his very arms into mist once more. Perhaps the very
mystery which enveloped her enhanced her charms. In any case, her power
grew upon the knight till he became most desperately enamoured, pressing
his suit with growing ardor. At first she coquetted with his passion,
laughing at his fervor and meeting his fiery protestations with playful,
incredulous mockery; but, finally touched by his fiery eloquence, she
made him a conditional promise. If he would prove his fidelity, would
remain true to her and her memory during her absence, no matter what
temptations might arise, for the space of just one little passing moon,
she would then return, reveal her identity, and become his bride, if he
still desired it.
Of course, he swore eternal fidelity, and she, with a little half-sad,
half-incredulous smile, vanished into the night mist. For several
evenings he wandered, lonely and disconsolate, on the shores of the
lake, longing and vainly seeking for his absent love and cursing the
tardy hours of his probation. Then, when his patience was about
exhausted, he was met there, on the selfsame spot, in the same mystic
moonlight and with the same suddenness and mystery, by another maiden,
even more beautiful than the first, and not inclined to be so distant.
She jeered at him for his depression, for his useless and stupid
fidelity to an absent prude, while with many lures and graces she
beckoned him on to join her in the moonlit mazes of the dance.
At first, remembering his promise, he made some show of resistance, but
very soon he yielded completely to her seductions, declaring his
admiration for this new beauty in ardent terms, and followed her with
extended arms, as she flitted on before him, keeping always just a
little out of reach; followed, heedless where his steps might lead,
reckless of consequences, conscious only of her tender glances and her
beckoning hand, till, borne up and on by the spell of her enchantment,
she had led him far out upon the treacherous surface of the lake, whose
placid ripples seemed magically to sustain both pursuer and pursued.
Then, when midway across the lake, she turned upon him, indignation
blazing in her eyes. With a single impatient gesture she flung off her
disguise and faced him, poised upon a curling wave, in all the airy
grace and winsomeness of his first abandoned love. “False lover!” she
cried, “where is now thy true love, thy sworn love? Forgotten, forsaken,
ere the moon that witnessed thy plighted vows hath run one-quarter of
its little circle. Behold thy doom! So perish the faithless!” Her white
arms waved in mystic incantation, a sudden storm-wind swept the lake,
the billows heaved and swirled beneath him, and a yawning chasm opened
at his feet. With a last passionate appeal he sank to its chilly depths,
while she, laughing in mocking derision, vanished in a shower of silver
spray.
The peasants declare that to this day, on quiet moonlit nights, one may
still see the white form of the Switez maid wandering, as if in search,
among the shadows of the forest-mantled shores or gliding over the
surface of the lake; while mingling with the whisper of the wind among
the trees and the murmurs of the waves upon the strand, one still hears
the echo of her words: “Forsaken, forsworn. So perish the faithless.”
Such is the story of the Switez maid, as told by Mickiewicz in
inimitable Polish verse, and translated into the symbolic language of
music by the Polish tone-poet, Chopin, in the A flat ballade.
The first warmly emotional theme of the composition, with its tender,
persuasive cadences, its ever-growing passionateness, symbolizes the
ardent and impulsive hero of the legend; while the bright, piquant
second theme admirably portrays the arch, coquettish heroine, with her
airy witcheries and playful grace. It cannot be mistaken, for it compels
attention as it enters, after a moment of suspense, in radical contrast
to what precedes, with the dainty rhythmic effect, so difficult to
render for most players. Its introduction later in a different key, with
different accompaniment and embellishments, represents the disguise with
which the maid attempts to cloak her identity, but the same melody is
distinctly traceable through all changes. The superb climax near the
close of the work forcibly depicts at once the swift approach and
resistless sweep of the tempest upon the lake and the intensity of the
emotional situation at the moment of the final catastrophe. Here, too,
is heard again the first melody, the hero theme, in a brief return, as
he makes his last, vain appeal, and we even catch the vanishing ripple
of the maiden’s mocking laughter.
The details of the story are not so literally worked out in the music,
or followed with so much realistic fidelity, as would have been the case
with Liszt or Wagner, or with some other more recent writers. Chopin’s
art is always rather suggestive than descriptive, dealing directly with
the moods evoked by a given situation or event, rather than with the
physical aspect of the events themselves; with the awe and terror
produced by the tempest, for instance, rather than with the audible or
visible phenomena of the tempest. In this particular case he deals
mainly with the general emotional and mental elements which underlie the
legend and the characteristics of the two personages who figure in it,
instead of treating its successive incidents in detail, or in definite
chronological order. The work is therefore sketched on broad,
fundamental lines, and leaves the setting and filling in in large
measure to the imagination of the hearer. This must always be the ideal
method in an art so ethereal and, in one sense, so vague as that of
music. Still, the connection between the music of this ballade and the
actual scenes and development of the legend is distinct enough to be
easily traced by those familiar with the story, and players or listeners
will find, as always, that the purely musical interest of this and all
the Chopin ballades is materially deepened and increased by the
background of relevant facts—by an acquaintance with the material on
which they are based and which gave to the composer the impulse for
their creation.