"Ballade Pour Adeline" was written Olivier Toussaint and Paul de Senneville.
It was composed as a homage for Senneville's daughter, Adeline, around the time she was born. Toussaint, who is a famous music producer, contacted Richard Clayderman in 1976 and asked him to record the piano ballad.
Clayderman was competing with another 20 contestants and eventually won the chance to record Senneville's tribute to his newborn daughter.
Paul de Senneville and Olivier Toussaint were deeply impressed by his soft touch and good technique, not being able to predict an outstanding success with 22 million copies in 38 countries in a short period of time.
After the recording, "Ballade Pour Adeline" became a fantastic success by selling over 20 million copies throughout the world. The song reached more than 35 foreign markets worldwide.
Despite being a piano ballad, the song has also been played at guitar. Structurally, it is formed of 19 bars divided into three parts. The first part includes arpeggios.
"Ballade pour Adeline" was also recorded by Jean Claude Borelly, in the first part of the 1980's. Also, in 1999, Clayderman recorded it as a duet along Francis Goya and it was part of the album "Together". In 2007, he once again released a version of the song on the album "A Thousand Winds". It was a celebration of the 30 years since the initial release, in 1976.
Clayderman's masterpiece was used in various projects such as "Lovingly Yours, Helen" and "G*yni**ers From Outer Space". The play is not only an expectation of youth and life but a desire to encourage the diversity in music.
Richard Clayderman's signature song, it proved to be a commercial success and stood the test of time. It is still one of the most recognizable piano plays.
Ballade pour Adeline means style, harmony, form and the slow pieces reveal a classical simplicity and chromaticism. Although Ballade pour Adeline was Clayderman s first success, Paul de Senneville composed other remarkable compositions for Clayderman, such as Lettre a ma mere (1979), Hungarian Sonata (1997), Princess du desert (1999) and many, many others.
In the early 80s, the French trumpeter, Jean-Claude Borelly, recorded his more familiar version using the same instrumental backing track as the original recording in collaboration with Gerard Salesses who arranged hundreds of recordings for Clayderman and Jean-Claude Borelly.
