Question about the titles of romantic era works

[Amphissa]

We have a thread going at present which pertains to compositions with the word ballad in the title. I seem to remember in the past that we had a similar thread about works called romance. We also see works called poem, scene/picture, etc.

So, my question is, do these words in titles actually designate distinctions in form, program or historical roots for the works? Or are they all pretty much interchangeable? Is there a substantive difference between a ballad, a poem and a romance for orchestra or for soloist with orchestra?

I've never been able to find a source that explains a difference between them. I've always just assumed that the word chosen for the title was an "artistic/romantic" choice, not something substantive. But I'm not a music scholar.

Is there a substantive difference? Can you point me to a source that explains?

[Lionel Harrsion]

As far as I can recall, Chopin was the first composer to use the term 'ballade' for an instrumental composition as opposed to the ballads of, say, Carl Loewe or the mediaeval (and later) broadsides.  The Chopin scholar Arthur Hedley writes, "How much trouble has been caused by Schumann's remark that, in writing his Ballades, Chopin had been 'angeregt durch Dichtungen von Mickiewiecz'!  From this casual statement, that the composer had been 'stimulated,' 'encouraged,' 'given the idea' by Mickiewicz's poems, far-fetched conclusions have been drawn.  By ingenious and tortuous methods a complete programme has been attached to each Ballade.  With the best will in the world, it is impossible to see how logically organised works like Opp. 23, 47, and 52 can be forced into the strait jacket of the poems which the programme-hunters have selected for the purpose'.  So it seems that Hedley concluded that the inventor of the instrumental ballade did not regard them as specifically programmatic, although later composers may have done (Brahms, for example, in the 'Edward' Ballade).

'Romance' seems to have started life as a generic name for the slow movements of romantic Piano Concertos (Chopin again) but it seems to me that by the middle of the nineteenth century, the other terms Amphissa mentions are, indeed, interchangeable for all practical purposes.  Ballades, poems, romances, scenes and pictures may or may not be programmatic but unless the composer has told us, it's impossible know.

That's my twopence-worth.  I'd be interested in the opinions of those with greater expertise in this area than mine.

[JimL]

"Romance" predates the Romantic period.  The slow movement of Mozart's D minor PC, K. 466 is titled "Romanze".  Nothing else, no tempo indication, nada.  It is presumed that it would have to be a slow tempo, from which one can infer certain assumptions Mozart must have been making.  It would be interesting to see if there was some literary or poetic form to which he was referring.

[Jimfin]

I think a lot of these terms were fairly vague, and composers had particular favourites. Coleridge-Taylor wrote at least three "Ballades" with an 'e', whereas Havergal Brian seems to have loved the term "legend", which, like "ballad" and "romance" suggests a story.

[nigelkeay]

I think that at their origin there were substantive differences, even if their distinctions seem rather blurred today. I can't really think of a single source that explains this, but to me it seems that the key is in the French language.

Interestingly, two of the composers mentioned so far lived in Paris (Mozart & Chopin) so I'm sure they would have been sensitive to the French usage, or at least historical roots, of ballade as distinct from romance.

According to the "petit Robert" ballade dates from 1260 and in its oldest meaning is a dancing song. It's also given to mean a short poem of three or more couplets with a refrain. It's going to be trickier to give a succinct definition of romance but I think it's worth noting that in French there is the verb romancer that means to embellish, to make into a fiction, so romance seems more linked to narrative/song or recitative element (without the dance connection). In French romance is said to derive from roman - medieval verse recounting legends.

[JimL]

Interesting how much the original meanings changed over the centuries.  Rather than a short poem, a ballad became a long epic narrative poem.  Wasn't Burger's Lenore, upon which Raff based his 5th Symphony a ballad?  It is also useful to note, considering the original meaning of ballad (i.e. a dance song) the relation to the word ballet, and perhaps bolero.

[Amphissa]

Have any of you perceived any sort of compositional structure, pattern, or form that would be consistently used for works titled ballad, as opposed to romance or poem or whatever?

I get it, that we can look back and identify who, or at least where, a title word seems to have been used first (like Chopin's ballads and Liszt's symphonic poem). But was that title ever attached to a specific structure for pieces with that title?

If we look back at literature and the arts of the era, the word poem had meaning in terms of designating works in the form of verse, with rhythm and evocative language. But the specific rhythm, line length, and stylistic elements of the language varied quite a lot. Many different types of works qualified as poetry, yet were still recognizable as poems.

A ballad was a narrative poem that was sung, usually slow, often sentimental or romantic, and told a story. But their was not, to my knowledge, a fixed structure for a sung ballad, other than that it was often simple, with short stanzas. So, once again, different types of structure could occur, but a song was always recognizable as a ballad.

A romance these days has to do with love and sex, but back in times gone by, the term also referred to a narrative about heroes doing heroic things, as well as ardent love. Maybe the heroic reference would be akin to a (musical) legend. Again, I'm not aware of a specific format or stylistic convention for romances and legends.

I ran across the following in the Cambridge Companion to Sibelius.

Tone poems, by contrast [with symphonies], are concerned at a fundamental level with the evocation of a particular mood or atmosphere, or with the articulation of an extra-musical narrative or programme. In response to such literary or pictorial subject matter, tone poems are characterised by their freer, innovative approach to musical form, particularly the tendency towards structures that telescope the traditional four-movement scheme of a symphony into a single musical span. Such forms often sacrifice dynamic motivic or harmonic development in favour of radically static moments of sonorous or poetic contemplation, intended as musical depictions of the (super-) natural world.

http://cco.cambridge.org/extract?id=ccol9780521815529_CCOL9780521815529A009

I'm inclined to think that this quoted comment would actually encompass all of the stand-alone orchestral works we see titled poem, ballad, romance, legend, scene, whatever -- and that the word selected by the composer would just be an artistic choice by the composer, not predicated on a specific compositional structure.

Surely people who are smarter and more knowledgeable than I have discussed this or written about it. I wonder if any composers have done so.

[Alan Howe]

I think you have summed it up very well, Dave.

[semloh]

A propos whether a ballade has any distinctive music structure, the old Grove entry answers explicitly:

BALLADE, a name adopted by Chopin for four pieces of pianoforte music (op. 23, 38, 47, 52)
which, however brilliant or beautiful, have no peculiar form or character of their own, beyond
being written in triple time, and to which the name seems to be no more specially applicable
than that of ' Sonnet' is to the pieces which Liszt and others have written under that name.

Similarly, it says:

ROMANCE (Germ. Romanze). A term of very vague signification, answering in music to the
same term in poetry, where the characteristics are rather those of personal sentiment and expression
than of precise form. The Romanze in Mozart's D minor PF. Concerto differs (if it differs) from
the slow movements of his other Concertos in the extremely tender and delicate character of
its expression; in its form there is nothing at all unusual.

[nigelkeay]

Seems that François Couperin might have been the first to mention ballade in a title, as follows from L'Apothéose de Lully: "La paix du Parnasse, faite aux conditions, sur la remontrance des Muses françoises, que, lorsqu'on y parleroit leur langue, on diroit dorénavant sonade, cantade, ainsi qu'on prononce ballade, sérénade, &c. Sonade en trio".

[JimL]

Similarly, it says:

ROMANCE (Germ. Romanze). A term of very vague signification, answering in music to the
same term in poetry, where the characteristics are rather those of personal sentiment and expression
than of precise form. The Romanze in Mozart's D minor PF. Concerto differs (if it differs) from
the slow movements of his other Concertos in the extremely tender and delicate character of
its expression; in its form there is nothing at all unusual.

Actually, the form of Mozart's K. 466 Romanze is quite distinctive from that of all his other PCs, as is that of the Larghetto from K. 491.  Virtually all the other slow movements are either sonata, sonatina or ternary forms, usually sonatina (sonata sans development).  K. 491 has a rondo (or rondeaux) format.  Formally, the Romanze of K. 466 is more like a rondo than anything else, but the first episode is in the tonic, modulating to the dominant, and the second episode is an up-tempo minore in the relative minor.