A - Autograph
| Date: | 1839 |
| Title: | Ballada op. 38 |
The autograph includes engraver marks corresponding to the layout of the music text in the first edition of E. Troupenas (sent by Chopin to J. Fontana to Paris in a letter from Mallorca at the beginning of 1839). There is no title page. The autograph served as base text to the French edition in the E. Troupenas & Co. publishing house in Paris, from where it was then sent to London, where it became base text for the English edition of the Wessel & Co. company. The dedication to Robert Schumann was indicated in a letter to J. Fontana from March 1839 and probably it was a mere courtesy, as Schumann's surname is written with a mistake and Chopin considered dedicating Schumann another piece "if Pleyel does not want to leave the Ballade."
In A there are numerous traces of corrections and deletions (e.g. in bar 179), which in the majority of the cases, however, does not impede the interpretation. In some of the cases, however, the deletions reflect Chopin's hesitation with respect to the final shape of some fragments, e.g., as far as the ending of the Ballade is concerned (bars 202-204).
The inaccuracies of A include:
- numerous omissions of accidentals, e.g. in bar 48, which, however, does not generally result in misunderstandings;
- frequent inaccuracies in the slurring – very long slurs do not have precise beginnings and endings (e.g. in bar 10, and often a break in the slur results from the necessity of its extension (e.g. in bar 116)
- frequent inaccuracies in hairpins and accents – the hairpins are irregular and in analogous places they often look completely different; the bottom edge has often different length than the upper one, hence in some places it is difficult to determine their accurate range (e.g. bar 26); they are often written on the stave, which resulted in oversights of hairpins at the time of copying the piece (e.g. in bars 125-126)
- in some of the bars the part of the right or left hand is written in an abbreviated manner, e.g. in bars 62, 158, 160.
| Original in: | Bibliothèque Nationale, Paryż |
| Shelf-mark: | Ms.107 |
