Ballade for Piano op. 19 N 56a

Fauré’s piano works are of central importance within his compositional oeuvre. He dedicated his “Ballade”, composed in 1879, to his teacher Camille Saint-Saëns. Structurally and in terms of its lyrical character, the work breaks from the genre’s epic form and takes on the traits of the sonata form. In 1881, Fauré arranged his “Ballade” for piano and orchestra, and the work was premiered in this new scoring. Drawing on the most recent discoveries and comprehensive source research, the work is presented in a scholarly-critical Urtext edition. The publication, which is based on the “Œuvres complètes de Gabriel Fauré”, includes a detailed foreword and notes on performance practice. Christophe Grabowski is a pianist and doctor of musicology who studied in Warsaw and in Paris. He edited, among other works, one volume of the “Œuvres complètes de Gabriel Fauré”, two volumes of the “Édition Complète des Œuvres de Claude Debussy”, and was the series editor for the new Chopin Complete Edition. In 2010, together with John Rink, he published the “Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions”.