Of all the great nineteenth-century piano cycles none, perhaps, has generated more speculation or misunderstanding than the four Ballades Chopin completed in Paris between 1835 and 1842. Why? A quartet of individuals conceptually similar yet neither definably nor repetitively alike … a folio of inspirations self-contained and self-sufficient … hybrid fusions fashioned out of sonata and rondo, variation and fantasy … entities independent of destiny yet bound together by common ties of dynastic allegiance … freely imagined edificies, dramatic in voltage – this is what they are. Dreamlands of the phantasmagoric … or invocations of Mickiewicz poems (a rumour based on a far from specific remark of Schumann’s concerning the genesis of the second), salon soufflés … or lullabies of the boudoir – this is what they are not.