Although Chopin remained committed to the idea of absolute music, his works with the title “Ballade” have invited speculation about possible literary contexts. Despite inconclusive evidence linking some of the Ballades to poetry of Chopin's compatriot, Adam Mickiewicz, which suggests ways of recovering narratives for the Ballades, this paper takes the stance that it is equally fruitful to view these pieces in terms of what Robert Hatten calls “expressive genres.” Though we may never get past the notion that music can only narrate plots offered in advance, we can make some strides in describing the emotional breadth of Chopin’s Ballades and the way that the dramatic sequence of emotional states mirrors those emotions evoked by literary works, whether or not they be the poems of Chopin’s compatriot. The present study, therefore, is an analysis of Chopin's Ballade No. 4 in f-minor, op. 52 from a hermeneutic and semiotic standpoint that seeks to detail the work's expressive narrative and place it in the context of both pastoral and tragic expressive narratives.
In addition to Hatten's hermeneutic semiotics, the paper makes use of concepts of strangeness and intertextuality to support its conclusions. The paper details the coding of a pastoral expressive narrative in the second theme of the 4th Ballade and an expressively transformed version of the pastoral theme near the end of the work. In addition, the paper details the coding of a tragic expressive narrative, particularly in the second half of the Ballade.