This handbook examines the four ballades of Chopin from both historical and analytical perspectives. Chapters 1 and 2 are historical, concerned with context, origins and aftermath. Chapters 3 and 4 are analytical, concerned with formal components and functions, and with genre. There are of course meeting-points between history and analysis, even at a very basic level of investigation. Analytical tools do, after all, depend on conventional categories which emerge from history, just as historical subject-matter properly includes musical structures. But they have essentially separate areas of competence, and ask very different kinds of questions about the musical work.

As far as possible I have tried to retain some clarity about the scope and limits of these two modes of enquiry. Above all I have been anxious that the researches of the one should not be allowed to generate conclusions about the other, since such conclusions will almost certainly lack refinement. In particular analytical enquiry inclines towards a reductive view of history. It embraces contradiction in a higher synthesis, and it subordinates diversity to a quest for unity. The analytical perspective tells us above all else about today's world. Specifically it tells us what Chopin and the ballades can mean to today's world.

An historical perspective, on the other hand, will seek to explore the relationship between our world and Chopin's world, and this entails recovering something of Chopin's world, restoring to it its contemporary complexity, diversity and contradiction. It is mainly for this reason that I felt it necessary to include a substantial discussion of context in the first two parts of chapter 1.