An Evening of Ballads

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

This program of story songs was christened “A Ballad Evening,” which eventually raised the thorny question: what is a ballad, anyway? Nowadays we use the word to describe any slow Broadway or top 40 song, but ballads originally came from England in the eighteenth century. They were street songs and folk-type songs whose many verses usually told stories of ordinary commoners. These songs were intended to be direct in their appeal, to grab the audience’s sympathy and attention, to commemorate important events, and so establish an immediate bond between a performer and his public.

It was primarily the English and the Germans who kept the ballad tradition alive in their art music. Italians wrote mostly love songs, serenades of seduction or frustration, as well as a generous serving of rather morbid songs linking love and death. French poetry tends to describe subtle nuances of feeling or trace philosophical reflections, while French music prizes sensuality and refinement; the resulting mélodie is most often an overheard secret, while ballads are frankly populist and public.

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