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Liszt’s first Ballade is a pretty sadly underrated work, probably because its sibling in B minor, written around 10 years later, has a much more obviously ambitious narrative scope. But the first ballade too is a lovely work of great craft. It’s essentially a series of variations on two themes – a cantabile melody in thirds, and a contrasting gently humorous march. The variations on the first theme are especially striking – all of them heavily emphasise the dominant and are built around untethering the movement of the melodic and non-melodic hands (hence all that hand-crossing). It’s the kind of ingenious textural exploration that Liszt would also deploy La Campanella, and generates some wonderful results here. [A little note: the first theme is actually in two parts, and in the analysis below I’ve separated the two parts when numbering variations to better take into account all of Liszt’s changes in texture.] The march theme, which constitutes the middle section of the work, rather sneakily integrates a moti
