Joseph Jongen's Ballade is a harmonically dense and complex piece reflecting his late-Romantic to modern transition. It features advanced chromaticism and a large-scale architecture that demands significant interpretative maturity.
The main challenge is executing the intricate polyrhythms and dense, shifting harmonies while maintaining structural clarity.
Comparable difficulty and character — good candidates for what to learn next.
Ballade No.1 (Op.105) is rated Henle level 8 of 9 — concert repertoire, roughly diploma level. In the RCM system it corresponds to about level 10.
You should be comfortable at Henle level 8 — meaning you can already play level 7–8 pieces cleanly. Learning it one level early is possible as a stretch piece, but more than that usually leads to months of frustration.
A typical performance of Ballade No.1 (Op.105) lasts about 10 minutes.
Ballade No.1 (Op.105) is available as free public-domain sheet music on IMSLP — the score is linked directly from this page.
Pieces at a comparable difficulty and character include Ballade en style libre by Joseph Jongen, Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, Ballade No.2 by Franz Liszt — see the full similar-pieces list on this page.