Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Learning Journal: Chopin Ballade No. 1 Op. 23

Dear fellow forum members,

This piece has been a long time coming. Back in around 2002, I watched the movie The Pianist. In there was a scene where the pianist played Chopin's Ballade No. 1 to the German Officer. That was the first time I heard this piece and has since been captivated by it.

In 2004, a year after moving to Australia, I was learning the violin. I had a Kawai digital piano with me but my piano skills was a joke (at some level it still is now), but I bought the music book with Chopin's complete Ballades. I tried to learn the notes but it was just impossible. The book was put away for another 12 years.

Fast forward to today, after 6 years of piano lessons, my teacher is finally convinced that I am ready for it (I had to go through AMEB grade 8 and Liszt Waldesrauschen to convince him!). Today marks the first lesson I am officially learning this piece.

This journey will take me 6 to 12 months depending on how far I want to go (which is nothing since I waited 12 years to get here). So I am writing a journal of my learning process. At times, I will likely post some video clips of me practising passages, or playing longer excepts here and there when I feel I am a bit more fluent. For now, I am too scared to aim for recording the entire piece at the end of this journey. At the very least, I am aiming to at least record excepts as long as I can manage that makes up the entire piece.

Obviously I have other pieces to learn in conjunction. So at times I may be absent due to focusing on other pieces.

Let the journey begin!

That's great Tubbie!

I also got to know this piece thanks to that movie but I don't remember when I watched it the first time.

I hope I won't have to wait as long as you had to.

That's wonderful to hear. I think you officially need to change your "I suck" tagline now that you're working on such an amazing piece that has haunted you for years.

I look forward to following along with your journey. Are you going to be posting here?

That's fantastic!
Congrats to you, my friend. Enjoy the process. We are here to cheer you on. I look forward to future posts.

This is very exciting, looking forward to reading about your journey with this piece.

As I've just finished reading Alan Rusbridger's ‘Play it again: an amateur against the impossible’, the amazing account of his struggles and triumphs learning that piece, I'm in awe!

Well, this will be my version of the same journey. My English is not good enough to write a book about it. So I'm sharing my journey here with much simpler journals plus videos/sound clips.

Yes MooseNotes, I will keep posting on this thread, similar to my 2-week journals for the preparation of AMEB grade 8 exam last year :-)

Other members seem to enjoy reading/following an entire journey in one post last time. So I'm repeating it for Chopin's Ballade.

Tubbie!

I really look forward to your posts. And, you've got me wondering if maybe I should join you and also get back to this piece. This one has been on the back-burner for ages. I don't know if you saw my thread but I'm in a bit of a slump with piano and maybe the Ballade is something I can focus on while I'm waiting to see what happens with my hearing loss. (though tomorrow I might think this is a crazy idea so who knows...)

Have you decided how you will approach this? What sections will you start with? What do you think will be the hardest bits? For me, I've already worked on this piece off and on for quite some time (but still can't really play it!) I can play parts of it, but haven't worked on it musically that much. Portions are memorized (and some not), but it's been awhile since I've tried any of it, so I would have to go back and review everything. Mostly at the time I was just trying to get the piece into my fingers. Technically there are several stumbling blocks for me that need work (ex. evenness of fingers in the scale passages; of course, tempo). You are much more technically proficient at piano than I am, so probably won't have the same difficulties.

I look forward to your first update. I have no doubt that eventually you will record this whole piece.

Thank you for asking those questions. I should be asking them myself and come up with some sort of plan before I begin.

I have spent a couple of days looking at the piece and going through some sections. My ex-Director once asked me how to eat an elephant. The answer is one bite at a time. So the first step is to break the piece into different bites (sections). To help breaking it up, I wrote down the bar numbers at the beginning of each line. There are 260 bars in the piece (I may have to recount that to be sure). I apologise that the following sections by bar numbers probably don't mean much unless you have the score:

Section 1: 1-65 (moderate)
Section 2a: 66-105 (easy)
Section 2b: 106-125 (hard)
Section 3a: 126-137 (moderate)
Section 3b: 138-161 (hard)
Section 4: 162-191 (moderate)
Section 5a: 192-202 (easy)
Section 5b: 203-260 (hard)

I had about 15 minutes in my previous lesson to go through the Ballade with my teacher. He has assigned me to learn up to bar 137. If you look at the bar numbers, that's half the piece, up to Section 3a. In the first half of the piece, the most difficult section in Section 2b. So I will spend most of my time learning this section while getting familiar with the rest of the first half before my next lesson. Luckily my teacher is on concert tour and won't be available for lesson until mid-April. So I have plenty of time.

Because I am so familiar with the piece as a listener, it is important for me not to listen to any recordings while I learn it. I must come to my own interpretation and avoid copying someone else unintentionally (sometimes intentionally).

First thing first, go though the notes and decide on the fingerings for bars 1-137. Resist the temptation to indulge myself by repeatedly playing my favourite passages within my fluency!

I plan to make a video recording this Easter long weekend. I want to see how poorly I play at the beginning of this journey then have something to compare with as I progress.

Stay tune!

I said earlier that I will avoid listening to anyone's performance this piece while I am learning it. But I like many who follows Valentina Lisitsa, I have been waiting for her to play i. When I woke up at 4:30am this morning and saw that she uploaded the video unexpectedly, I had to watch it!

I'm going to monitor this thread!

I've loved the piece for many years as well and cannot wait till I feel that I am ready to learn it.

My teacher said I can try now, but I don't feel nearly nearly ready mentally, especially not since my favourite version is one which Horowitz plays and it just sings and sings.

I'm so happy for you tubbie that you're at the point of learning it! Best of luck and keep us all posted!

Was going to make a video of my 1-week progress yesterday but got invited for lunch. Was going to make the video today then got calls from friends invited themselves. Then one of my dogs cut her paw cut and had to take her to the vet.

This video isn't going to happen is it?

Sigh...

I LOVE THIS PIECE.

The only video that can happen at this point is a video of your nine day progress, but only if you do it sometime tomorrow.

Forrest

Friends are late. So I squeezed in a quick practice. Friends aren't here yet, so I edited a video clip. They aren't here after that, so I uploaded the video to YouTube. Still not here. So I posted the video link here, as promised :-)

This is roughly one week progress. I just managed to practice for an hour or two a few days really.

Friends gone. Now I can write my journal.

I spent most of my practice sessions learning the notes. In particular, the more difficult sections. In the video, they are:

2:20 the arpeggios notes are mostly repetitive so not difficult to read but tricky to get from notes to notes
3:26 the arpeggios are also repetitive here so it's easier to memorise it then practice
3:56 too many notes to memorise so had to practise separate hands to get some fluency then play hands together very slowly

After my friends are gone, I managed to start learning the notes for another page. So I am up to bar 147 out of bar 260, almost up to half of page 9 of total 15 pages.

I spend very little time on the more easier passages, like the 2 and a half page, page 5 and first half of page 6. There will be plenty of opportunities to play these and learning the notes won't take long.

Now I have 4 and a half pages of difficult passages to learn the notes. I hope I get to all of them by end of Easter Monday.

Back to the piano!

Early riser here!
Loving the progress, motivates me so much to keep practicing.
What a wonderful piece as well, even on par with my favorite piece Op 31 scherzo Chopin.

Kind Regards and Best of Luck,

Today I got some fluency from bars 130 to 163. I'll keep on practising this section for the rest of today. Tomorrow is to learn the notes from 203 to the very end, 260.

Then the plan is to keep practising the following 2 hardest sections over and over again until they are more fluent than the easy sections.

Hardest sections:
106-164
203-260 (presto con fuoco plus 2 bars before)

It is tempting to play the sections from start to finish repeatedly. I must resist! Instead, within these 2 sections, I must find the hardest bars and practice them separately. Once they becomes more fluent than the rest, then only I am allowed to practice bigger chunks until the fluency of the entire section is consistent.

Next will be to visit the "easy" sections and find the hardest bits to practice. Then I can start to learn the piece as a whole and be ready for my next lesson in mid April.

Here's some learning notes video of bars 106-164 and 203-260.

I've cramped so many notes in my head this weekend I need a break!