ballade
nounEtymology Borrowed from French ballade. Doublet of balada and ballad.
1
Entertainment, Lifestyle, Music Any of various genres of single-movement musical pieces having lyrical and narrative elements.
- Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there.1892, Walter Besant, “Prologue: Who is Edmund Gray?”, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC:
- "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly mournful ballade[…1915, Richard Le Gallienne, Vanishing Roads and Other Essays:
1 more example
- Even a 10-minute Chopin ballade for piano, let alone Messiaen’s 75-minute “Turangalila Symphony,” tries to grapple with, activate and organize a relatively substantial span of time.2007 December 30, Anthony Tommasini, “A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Jan 2021:
2
Communications, Journalism, Literature, Media, Poetry, Publishing, Writing A poem of one or more triplets of seven- or eight-line stanzas, each ending with the same line as refrain, and usually an envoi; more generally, any poem in stanzas of equal length.
- Derived terms
- ballade royal
- Related terms
- ballad