Music scholars have long been trying to determine the major influences on the Ballades of Fryderyk Chopin. Some, like Karol Berger, have pointed to ideological influences of the Polish emigration in Paris, while others, like James Parakilas, have given credit to the generic characteristics of the European literary ballad. In my own view, however, the most salient extra-musical factor in the background to Chopin's Ballades are Ballady, a series of poems by the 19th century Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. / After Chopin's death, Mickiewicz's Ballady were frequently associated with Chopin's Ballades, and in the first chapter I demonstrate this by examining the reception history of these works. In the next chapter I analyze the ideology of the Polish emigration in Paris, including prominent themes of alienation, powerlessness, morbid anxiety, pilgrimage, and nostalgia, which were used by that expatriate society to identify itself. Finally, in the third chapter, I trace analogies between these themes and their manifestations in Mickiewicz's Ballady. This analysis of Mickiewicz's poems forms the basis of my interpretation of Chopin's Second Ballade, where I discuss how certain textual and thematic features of the poems taken as a group can be mapped onto the form and musical discourse of the piano piece. / In sum, although the associations between specific poems and Chopin's Ballades have been made by many authors, no one has distilled a single narrative archetype from the group of Mickiewicz's Ballady to apply to Chopin's works.

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