In contrast to the standard “theme and variations,” Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations don’t unfold as a frolicking and far-reaching episodic journey. As an alternative, they’re unrelenting, declamatory, and haunting. The seven-note theme, equally harking back to Arnold Schoenberg’s tone rows and Bach’s C-sharp minor Fugue from Ebook 1 of the Nicely-Tempered Clavier (BWV 849), permeates the whole work in a means which makes it really feel severely natural.
Whereas Beethoven and Schubert improvised variations on a theme as a stunning occasion trick, Leonard Bernstein used Coplands Variations at events to “empty the room, assured, in two minutes.” Bernstein described the work as “sharp as nails,” and a “synonym for contemporary music—so prophetic, harsh and great, and so full of recent feeling and considering.” Invoking the exhausting, chilly texture of stone, composer Marc Blitzstein described the work as “lithic.”
Unusually, Copland composed the twenty variations out of sequence, “not realizing the place or how they’d ultimately match collectively…One high-quality day, when the time was proper, the order of the variations fell into place.” The composer noticed that the Piano Variations, accomplished in October of 1930, had a sure “rightness.”
Within the opening, the theme is offered first as a puzzle, scattered extensively over two octaves and interrupted by dry, thudding chords. Pianist Stephen Hough observes that “Variation 1 is the one time we hear the theme in its pure type, in the proper hand, but right here the left hand tags alongside a bar behind like a shadow of discord.” The Piano Variations give us a way of constructing rigidity, as in a horror film involving some inexorable titanic power. Hough writes,
The brief theme is ostensibly in C sharp minor/E main; however the B sharp—the notice that may lead us to the tonic—has been enharmonically distorted to C pure, a international physique to both key. This theme seems in the midst of the work the other way up, inside out, backwards, like a dice held as much as the sunshine from each potential angle—its ‘C’ pure a bump on its aspect stopping the music from settling into a snug place or pulse.
In 1957, in response to a fee from the Louisville Orchestra, Copland returned to this music and tailored it for giant orchestra. The Orchestral Variations tackle new dramatic weight and majesty. Listening to each variations, you would possibly get the sense that you’re listening to two fully completely different items.
Piano Variations
Orchestral Variations
Recordings
- Copland: Piano Variations, Daniil Trifonov Deutsche Grammophon
- Copland: Orchestral Variations, Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony Amazon
Featured Picture: “Energy” (c. 1933), Edward Bruce
