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I've already started learning the first Chopin ballade. I'm about 2 minutes in, right around the tragic sounding part that leads into the calm resolution. It's difficult but I know I can get it up to speed eventually. Are there any etudes you would recommend that would improve my ability for this ballade?

I think you're barking up the wrong tree. The material in the ballade is less difficult than the material in most of the etudes, so I don't know how helpful they would be.

The Ab Major etude, Op. 10#10 might be helpful for handling the balance of the hand in the coda of the ballade, and the F Major etude, Op. 10#8 or the F minor etude, Op. 25#2 could help with some of the RH passagework. Some of the figuration in the middle section of E minor, Op. 25#5 is also similar to some of the passages in the ballade.

But...more helpful would be making sure your scales and arpeggios are fluent and up to speed and making exercises out of the passages in the ballade that suit your unique situation.

I played the 1st and 3rd Ballades long before I tackled the etudes, maybe it's a misconception that Chopin's etudes help to solve most of the technical problems in his other works, maybe some, but the etudes stand mostly on their own as to technical demands, one should be able to face the technical (not the musical!) difficulties of the 1st Ballade without being able to toss of any of the etudes.

I'm in agreement with both the above posts. I'd actually learned the first 3 ballades before ever seriously tackling the etudes and learned the fminor alongside Op. 10.

I agree. The Chopin études don't build technique, they refine it.

And when you get right down to it, etudes don't solve problems, people solve problems - etudes simply give you some notes to work with, and in this case, the notes in the etudes are generally more treacherous than the notes in the ballade.

Can you expand the difference between "build" and "refine"?

Build probably means starting from being technically weak in one area and working from there. Refine probably means already being strong technically in one area, but going from being good to great. So, I guess refining is still building, but already starting from a high level and going even higher.

I agree -many of the etudes are harder than many of the preludes, waltzes, nocturnes and ballades.

Build = going from not being able to do something at all to being able to do it

Refine = going from being able to do it to being able to do it with efficiency, grace, and nuance

I guess you can play around with Liszt's 6th Hungarian Rhapsodies to develop the right hand octave technique for the second theme when it appears in A major, Rachmaninoff's G minor prelude to prep for the treacherous blocked chords at the beginning of the coda, and then struggle with the chord-arpeggios for the rest of the coda. Then there's the problem with the scherzo-section, where the right hand's passagework gets awfully cramped for the required speed..