In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany the vogue for ballads-often of English, Celtic or Scandinavian origin-was part of an aesthetic that rejected Gallic-rococo artifice in favour of an idealized ‘primitive’ art. Some ballads, like the Danish folk-tale from which Goethe drew his Erlkönig, are nail-biting races against the clock, compressed thrillers-in-verse. Sensational, ghoulish and supernatural themes were the norm: tales of wife-murder, parricide, warring clans (a Scottish favourite), avenging revenants, miraculous rescues, fatal enchantment by fairies and sprites. with the same music sung to each verse) narrative song, with the tune habitually passed down from singer to singer, generation to generation. But the word gradually came to mean a strophic (i.e. In the Middle Ages a ‘ballad’, like its French and Italian equivalents (ballade, balata), was a dance-song, typically performed by street minstrels.
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