Abstract
Grieg's contribution to the nineteenth-century ballade genre is his monumental Op. 24 piano ballade which is cast in the unusual form of theme and variations. Musicological criticism, focusing predominantly on the musical text, has posited Grieg's ballade as a split and deficient narrative structure with a relatively inert episodic first half and a dynamic conclusion. By turning to evidence from early recordings, this chapter seeks to rehabilitate such score-based accounts of Grieg's Op. 24, which exclude the all-important temporal dimension of the composition's expressive raison d'être and the agency of the performer in narrative construction. Specifically, the piano rolls of Eugen D'Albert and Percy Grainger, two pianists that can be situated close to the composer himself, are examined and discussed. These pianists' styles, instilled with a freer and subjective handling of performance tempo, exemplify an aesthetic which espouses the rhetoric of time befitting the rhapsodic, sung-like character of folk ballads and associated cultural tropes of storytelling. These performances, captured in early recordings, not only afford the listener a renewed listening experience but also disambiguate issues of narrative design in Grieg's Op. 24 further permitting a critical re-evaluation of this work's unduly marginalised generic status.