Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23, dates to sketches Chopin made in 1831 during his eight-month stay in Vienna. It was completed in 1835 after his move to Paris, where he dedicated it to Baron Nathaniel von Stockhausen, the Hanoverian ambassador to France. It was a reflection about Frédéric Chopin loneliness in the city far away from his home in Poland, where a war was happening against the Russian Empire’s oppression. – Yuja Wang
