In his 'Ballades' Chopin created a new, typically Romantic, genre of piano music. Works of this type were not known in earlier instrumental music. Volume I of the National Edition contains all four of
The underlying concept of Chopin's Nocturnes probably lay in the "romance-like" character of adagios and larghettos of piano concertos at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the operatic aria