Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Opus 56b
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna

Brahms spent the summer of 1873 in the village of Tutzing on the western shore of the Starnberger See south of Munich. He was 40 years old and his career was going well. Named conductor of the chorus and orchestra of the Vienna Gesellschaftkonzerte the previous fall, he had spent that first concert season training and leading these forces in a series of concerts. Now he came to this resort town to relax and compose.

Brahms loved it there. To the conductor Hermann Levi he wrote: "Tutzing is far more beautiful than we first imagined. We have just had a gorgeous thunderstorm; the lake was almost black, but magnificently green along the shores; usually it is blue, though of a more beautiful and deeper hue than the sky. In the background there is a range of snow-covered mountains-one can never see enough of it." That summer, after years of work, Brahms finally refined two string quartets to the point where he would allow them to be published, and he was still at work on his First Symphony. This most imposing of musical forms (with its inevitable comparison to Beethoven) had occupied him since he was in his twenties, but he was still plagued by self-doubt. In particular, he was worried about his ability to compose for orchestra, and during that summer at Tutzing Brahms planned to write a brief work for orchestra to give himself practice composing for orchestra.

This was a set of variations on a theme attributed to Haydn and shown to Brahms by his friend Carl Ferdinand Pohl, biographer of that earlier composer. The theme (which had never been published) appeared in the manuscript for a Feldpartita Haydn had composed for Prince Esterhazy's troops during the 1780s; as its name suggests, a Feldpartita is a piece designed to be played in open fields, usually by military band. Though Brahms gave his work the title Variations on a Theme by Haydn, subsequent research has shown that the original Feldpartita was not written by Haydn, but probably by his student Ignaz Pleyel, who in turn may have borrowed it from an old pilgrims' hymn: in the manuscript, the theme is marked "Chorale St. Antoni." Brahms may have planned this project to give him practice writing for orchestra, but he was still so unsure of his abilities that he first composed the variations for two pianos, and only then did he orchestrate them. The triumphant première of the orchestral version took place in Vienna on November 2, 1873, but Brahms and Clara Schumann had already played through the two-piano version together the previous summer; the official première of this version took place in Vienna on February 10, 1874.

The structure of the Haydn Variations is simplicity itself: the theme, eight variations, and a finale that itself is a further variation. The original theme falls first into two five-bar phrases, followed by a series of phrases of irregular length. The eight variations, which stretch the theme in a range of ingenious ways, are all relatively brief; curiously, Brahms often writes tempo indications in the piano version that are slightly different from the orchestral version. The finale is ingenious-and very impressive-music. Brahms derives a five-measure theme from the original theme and uses this new version as a ground bass, very much in the manner of a passacaglia or chaconne (this finale looks ahead to the magnificent passacaglia that would conclude Brahms' final symphony twelve years later). This ground bass repeats seventeen times as Brahms spins out a series of further variations in the upper voices; all of this builds to a brilliant close full of swirling runs and one final, powerful restatement of the original theme.