ballade

noun

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

   “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.”

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

   “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.”

2. 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.