That is played on the vihuela, an instrument that looks a lot like a guitar, but sounds a lot like a lute.
The variation form is particularly attractive to composers because it poses the basic problems of variety within consistency that underly all composition. The idea is that you take a simple theme--folk melodies are often popular--or a harmonic progression (this one is a romanesca, a melodic-harmonic formula popular in the 16th and 17th centuries) and see what you can do with it. Repeating the basic phrase and harmonic structure in each variation provides the consistency so you just have to come up with the variety.
But composers have found many different ways of approaching the form. A particularly interesting one was the Nocturnal by Benjamin Britten for guitar using the air "Come Heavy Sleep" by John Dowland as the theme, but instead of beginning with it, he places it at the end and works his way toward it. Quite ingenious! Here is a performance by Marcin Dylla:
Another very ingenious approach was taken by Beethoven in his "Eroica" Variations for piano. He first states the bass line to the theme and does four variations on it before giving us the actual theme followed by fifteen variations and a finale which is a fugue on that original bass line (plus its inversion) followed by an Andante con moto which is another variation on the theme, not the bass line. Here is a performance by Pierre-Laurant Aimard:
And I haven't even mentioned any of the really famous sets of variations. So it might be interesting to do a survey of the theme and variation form and how composers have worked with it. What do you think?
What Britten did with Dowland's theme is conceptually like what Peter Burkholder has described in the work of Charles Ives. A colloquial way of putting it is to say they both used "reverse variation" where the theme comes at the end but Burkholder used a more fit-for-musicology-monograph term and calls it "cumulative form", where aspects of a theme, fragments often, and even fully fledged countersubjects to a theme show up as if in some kind of not presented quodlibet and are presented in the work before the theme is finally presented at the very end of the work. Once you pick up that this is a way that Ives frequently liked to compose a lot more of his music makes sense. :) For those who just can't get into Ives, fortunately, Britten's Nocturnal is one of the most brilliant examples of this approach to variation and developing variation.
ReplyDeleteBluntly practical point about it is, it only works if you pick a theme that you can be pretty confident your audience will recognize and Britten was shrewd to name-drop Dowland in the full title!
Theme and variation is unusual in that there is Bach and Beethoven on one side and everyone else on the other. When listening to a Bach or Beethoven T&V it's like hearing a world open up. With others it is note spinning. Sometimes as with Brahms or Schumann or a few others it is interesting and enjoyable without being a masterwork. For the rest, theme and variation seems too predictable.
ReplyDeleteThanks for weighing in with some interesting comments. I hadn't thought of Charles Ives in this connection, so thanks for that idea. I really do have to look into Burkholder's discussion of Ives.
ReplyDeleteBach and Beethoven do certainly dominate, but there are some pretty interesting sets of variations by Haydn, Mozart and Brahms as well. But oh yes, there are stacks and stacks of mediocre noodling by most variation composers.
I have written individual posts on the Bach Goldbergs and the Beethoven Diabelli variations, but I think it might be interesting to do a bit of a survey of the genre.
Elaine Sisman made what I considered a persuasive book length case that Haydn mastered variation technique (which is not necessarily the same as variation form). If we throw in Haydn's monothematic sonata movements we could playfully consider that he mastered variation form by way of disguising it as sonata. :)
ReplyDeleteI haven't done a serious study of Haydn's variations, but I know he wrote a lot of symphony and sonata movements in that form. He often wrote what are called "double variations" where two different themes alternate.
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