Composer’s Note:

The performer will detect right away the connection this work possesses to the Ballade No. 1 in G Minor by Frederic Chopin. Literally every single measure uses that work as a palimpsest, a template, or a source for the present one. Coup aprs coup functions as a shadow, a dark echo of the Chopin. Nothing could equal the pain and torment explicitly present in the First Ballade; few other piano compositions are as nakedly revealing as that work, in which the metaphorical cause, the agony, and the despair that arises within the music lie directly on the surface. No one with any sensitivity can listen impassively to that work. I do not wish to imply that it is the only one of Chopin’s Ballades or any of his other works that have this directness of expression but only to say that the First Ballade goes further beyond the realm of the abstract and deeply into the concrete world of pain.