A Ballade for Uncle Bob

As musicians, we all have a piece that we feel is ours alone, our “signature” piece.  Mine is the Chopin G-minor Ballade.  I did not realize until late in life that this piece is considered a hapless war horse to most pianists.  This is perhaps due to its treacherous difficulty, its uniquely enigmatic character, and the phenomenal overexposure it received in the hands of Vladimir Horowitz.

I first heard this piece played live as a fifteen year old.  I was at music camp; another student—an older boy who was among three musicians there I would meet again in college—was being driven mad by the final pages.  The piece is simple and melancholy in its melodies, but each turn of the page brings a new dimension of expression until it explodes with virtuosity—one hopes—at the end.  I had been accustomed to playing bombastic pieces; even as a young girl I had the ability to master difficult technical passages.  The challenge in this Ballade, however, is the forward momentum of the line.  A pedestrian approach leaves it sounding like a limp waltz.

The appeal of the G-minor Ballade was not in its technical challenge, but rather the way it spoke to me at a particular time in my life.  That same summer I lost a beloved uncle.  My family did not tell me of his passing, as it occurred just as I left for music camp.  What they did not realize is that I already knew, or more specifically, I sensed that something had happened to him. 

This uncle was my father’s younger brother.  Born into a difficult family, each of the boys had their own way of coping.  My father found his outlet through the violin.  My uncle, on the other hand, had many different dreams that he chased.  I discovered one day when I was very young that he had a love for the piano.  During a visit, he sat down at my piano and began to play.  I do not know what he played, but it was as if someone tapped him and the music came pouring out.  Because he had lost most of his little finger in a childhood accident, pursuing the piano had never been an option for him.  Still, he loved to make music.  We talked about how we each got a rush in our chests at the way the spacious sounds from the piano could envelope us.  He encouraged me to keep playing no matter what.  In a way, I was living this dream for him, he said.

Thoughts of my uncle pre-occupied me during the six weeks at music camp.  I kept seeing shadows of him everywhere.  When I returned home, I discovered a memorial notice in a stack of papers that confirmed what I had already known in my heart:  he was gone.  It was many more weeks before anyone told me what had happened.  In the meantime, I turned to the G-minor Ballade, very much against the wishes of my piano teacher.  I had been directed to work on a different Chopin concert piece that summer, the B-flat minor Scherzo, but as its name suggests a “joke”, I was not in the mood. 

I have always found something unique in the character of G-minor, perhaps a result of “even tempering” centuries ago. (Even tempering was the practice of forcing a consistent interval between notes.  This is how pianos are tuned in the modern day, allowing pieces to be composed in every possible key.) G-minor, to me, has a deeper hue than other minor keys as well as a precarious tonal quality.  If we believe that composers are purposeful in their choice of key signatures, we must consider the rarity of G-minor across the literature.  Is it a key reserved for making a particular musical statement?  Mozart wrote only two of his forty-one symphonies in minor keys, both in G-minor:  the “little” G-minor Symphony and the “great” G-minor Symphony.  Schumann’s  G-minor Sonata is perhaps the darkest in the mainstream romantic piano sonata literature.  Would Rachmaninoff’s famous Prelude Op. 23, No. 5 have the same predatory quality if it had been composed in E-minor?  Or C-sharp minor?

G-minor brought to the enigmatic Chopin Ballade the perfect balm for my teenage despair.  Chopin himself was expressing the longing of an expatriate, the pain of a tumultuous love affair, the struggle of one searching for his own identity, the agony of a crippling illness.  Inside the mechanics of this piece I came to terms with mortality, both my uncle’s and my own.  I explored the travails of swimming upstream against the current, concluding at last that it was better to have taken the journey after all.  I found solace in meeting unspeakable tragedy with unbearable beauty. 

After a twenty-year absence from the concert stage, I used the Chopin G-minor Ballade as part of my program for the 2001 Van Cliburn Amateur Competition.   It had been a rite of passage for me as an artist; I thought its presence would be bolstering.  It was suggested to me later that had I not programmed this dreaded piece in my program I might have reached the final round.   In the end, I was happy with the choice I made.  The pieces in my repertoire are like photos in an album; each captures an important part of my life’s story.  I was glad to take my uncle with me on this particular journey.  He helped me to further my own dreams, and I hope I did the same for him.