Chopin’s 🌋😭🥹❤️‍🔥 Ballade no. 1

My beloved Chopin wrote 4 Ballades and 4 Scherzos which rank among the greatest pieces of music ever written by humankind.

They’re my lifetime K2 to climb (K2 cos that’s so much more technical to climb than Everest 🏔️), the set of 8. I’ve got 6 and a half down; Scherzo 3 remains untouched, and I’ve been halfway through polishing up Scherzo 4 for years. (I’m not that motivated tbh cos I secretly prefer the Ballades to the Scherzos - they tell much more intricate, melodic, heartstring-tugging stories than the more jagged, repetitive, though nonetheless pleasurable textures of the Scherzos).

Honestly? It doesn’t feel like I’ve been learning this piece, Ballade no. 1, for 31 years. That’s right - I started it in 1994 as a wide-eyed student at her first masterclass with Maestro Dario de Rosa of the Trio di Trieste… in desperate infatuation with this music since Rubinstein’s immortal recording of the set of 8 first made themselves acquainted with my ears - straight to my quivering heart. (Thousands of listens after I still don’t tire of them. They’re eternal to me. And I can’t really bear to listen to anyone else. Rubinstein gets the elusive essence, the soul stuff, out of these pieces like no one else can.)

“So what would you like to learn?” He said to me in Italian.
“Chopin’s Ballade no. 1.”
I’ll never forget that slight pause, the eyebrows going up. When he spoke again his tone had changed - a new, tacit recognition, whether of my ambition, or of a fellow love of the piece? “
Va bene. Allora…”

I carry these memories in my bones and flesh and blood and sinew as I continue to chip away at the marble, all this time later. Like a river dipping underground and out of sight, only to reemerge further down its flow, this piece has never left me, despite long intervening years when it was silent in my fingers.

So I carry my spills and mistakes with pride, like war wounds. Because I’m still going. I’m still in love with this piece. It still sings to my heart like nothing else - my first serious grown-up piece as a pianist, the one that lay far beyond the grade 8, the one I have thrown myself against with gritted teeth till something inside cracked and bled and gave up.

And yet - richer than ever, tenderer than ever, more sonorous and dance-like and fire and brimstone,
Here we are, still talking to each other, in private moments of caught breath, breathless passages of torrential notes, chords that will still break one’s heart clean open - where the stumbles, the scrambles, the trips, the pauses somehow…
bring this celestial piece down to earth,
Where we can feel it as human, so deeply human, all too human.