Setting the question of the narrativity aside, many musicologists have paid attention to the characteristic structures in Chopin’s ballades. Their general common strategy was to highlight the differences from the classical norm, referring to the mono-tonal theory of Schenker. But, if Chopin succeeded in elevating his ballades into a new independent genre, a way must be found to describe their structures in a manner that can be understood in their own terms.
For this purpose, it may be useful to employ the concepts of “Interlocking tonality” and “Directional tonality”, both concepts being brought to music analysis by G. George (1970), H. Krebs (1981) and W. Kinderman (1988). When the two concepts are operatively combined, all the ballades will be described as the different realizations of the so-called “Interlocking-Directional tonality”, which consists of the original architectonic principle set out by Chopin.
Liszt composed two ballades, but their quality is uneven. While the First Ballade can be understood as the modest assimilation of Chopin’s, the Second Ballade can be well described as the interlocking of two tonal directionalities, that is the realization of the potentiality of the architectonic principle which Chopin’s never achieved in his ballades.