The French ballade comes from the word ballo, which is Latin for dancing. A ballad is a lyrical story with a heroic or romantic plot, often set to music.
The origin of the ballad is considered to be France. In the thirteenth century, a new form appeared in the poetry of the troubadours. It replaced the canzone - a courtly song, and was poems with the same length of time and rhyme, set to music. The ballad canon was finally formed by the fourteenth century. It was a work in three stanzas with a message (an appeal to a specific person, for example, a prince or a beloved) and the last line repeated.
In the Middle Ages, the ballad fashion spread throughout Europe. Such famous poets as Petrarch and Dante did not disdain composing ballads. English ballads were notable for their militarism and politicization. They praised the exploits of Robin Hood and King Edward the Fourth. And the ballads written by German writers were distinguished by a general gloomy tone and often talked about the afterlife. One of the classic examples of the German ballad is "The Forest Tsar". This is a story about a little boy who at night rides with his father on a horse through the forest, and whose life is taken by the forest king, captivated by the beauty of the baby.
The Russian ballad grows out of folklore and dates back to pre-revolutionary times. In the nineteenth century, Vasily Zhukovsky was called "balladist", who skillfully translated works of the era of German romanticism into Russian. Among his translated ballads - "The Forest King" and other works by Goethe, as well as ballads by Schiller, Walter Scott and other famous romantics. Zhukovsky also wrote his own ballads. One of them, "Svetlana", familiar to all schoolchildren by the lines "Once on Epiphany Eve, girls wondered," was recognized by contemporaries as the best work in its genre.
In Russia, the ballad has always been a dramatic work, focused on one episode without mentioning the background. In the center of the ballad, as a rule, is the fate of one hero, without describing his appearance and experiences. This is an objective story about an event in which the plot is more important than a colorful description, a transitional genre from folklore to realism. A classic example of a Russian ballad is Pushkin's Song of the Prophetic Oleg.
Among the great Russian poets and writers, the authors of ballads were Mikhail Lermontov, Afanasy Fet, and Alexei Tolstoy. Musical ballads were written by composers Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin.
Ballad as a genre did not cease to exist even in the Soviet era. Patriotic ballads with stories about epic heroes were played on the radio in concerts for piano and orchestra and were recorded on gramophone records.