Dictionary

ballade en · NOUN

Borrowed from French ballade. Doublet of balada and ballad.

Any of various genres of single-movement musical pieces having lyrical and narrative elements.
- Even a 10-minute Chopin ballade for piano, let alone Messiaen’s 75-minute “Turangalila Symphony,” tries to grapple with, activate and organize a relatively substantial span of time. 2007 December 30, Anthony Tommasini, “A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Jan 2021:
- Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there. 1892, Walter Besant, “Prologue: Who is Edmund Gray?”, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC:
- "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly mournful ballade[… 1915, Richard Le Gallienne, Vanishing Roads and Other Essays:
A poem of one or more triplets of seven- or eight-line stanzas, each ending with the same line as refrain, and usually an envoi; more generally, any poem in stanzas of equal length.

Spelling	Features	Labels	Source
ballades	Number=Plur		lexicographic