Definition of "ballade"

ballade

noun
plural ballades
1. (music) Any of various genres of single-movement musical pieces having lyrical and narrative elements.
  Quotations
  Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there.
  1892, Walter Besant, “Prologue: Who is Edmund Gray?”, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […]
  "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly mournful ballade […]
  1915, Richard Le Gallienne, Vanishing Roads and Other Essays
  Even a 10-minute Chopin ballade for piano, let alone Messiaen’s 75-minute “Turangalila Symphony,” tries to grapple with, activate and organize a relatively substantial span of time.
  2007 December 30, Anthony Tommasini, “A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well”, in New York Times‎
2. (poetry) A poem of one or more triplets of seven- or eight-line stanzas, each ending with the same line as refrain, and usually an envoi; more generally, any poem in stanzas of equal length.