from this. The introduction is written in time, and the more extensive Presto con fuoco coda is written in or . The rest of the piece is written in , rather than the which characterizes the others. It is also considered one of Chopin's most technically and musically demanding works. In popular culture The ballade has featured prominently in several films. It is performed on-screen in Gaslight by the Polish pianist Jakob Gimpel, credited as the Pianist. A performance of the piece is central to the plot of the 2002 Roman Polanski film The Pianist, where it moves a German officer to hide and supply with food the pianist, Władysław Szpilman, played by Adrien Brody. On the soundtrack, it is played by Janusz Olejniczak. It also appears in the 1991 film Impromptu, where Chopin is playing this piece when he is interrupted by George Sand and meets her for the first time. In 2010, the British journalist Alan Rusbridger (the editor of The Guardian) dedicated a year to learning Ballade No. 1 and produced a book about the experience, Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible. The piece was also the subject of the 2013 Channel 4 documentary Chopin Saved My Life. It is quoted in Mieczysław Weinberg's Symphony No. 21 ("Kaddish"). After Chopin's death, the Belgian violinist and musician Eugène Ysaÿe made his own arrangement of Ballade No. 1 for violin and piano. That arrangement was used as the soundtrack for the final episode of the Japanese anime Your Lie in April in 2014–2015. Japanese figure skater and two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu skated his short program to Ballade No. 1 in four seasons between 2014 and 2020. The program has earned him four world records and contributed to the win of his second Olympic title such as the completion of the first career Super Slam in the men's singles discipline. As of December 2021, Hanyu's Ballade No. 1 has set the five highest short program scores across all judging systems and is the most successful program in that competition segment. References Further reading Berger, Karol (Summer 1996). "The Form of Chopin's 'Ballade,' Op. 23." 19th-Century Music, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 46–71. Rothstein, William (1994). "Ambiguity in the Themes of Chopin's First, Second, and Fourth Ballades." Intégral, vol. 8, pp. 1–50. External links Ballade No. 1 played by Josef Hofmann Ballade No. 1 played by Alfred Cortot