ballade

plural ballades

1. entertainmentAny of various genres of single-movement musical pieces having lyrical and narrative elements.

   "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly mournful ballade[…

   1915, Richard Le Gallienne, Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

   2 more examples

   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, […], →OCLC

   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 The New York Times, archived from the original on 26 Jan 2021

2. communicationsA 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.