Theme and Variations: Anatomy of a Freewheeling Melody

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” To Robert Burns, love is like a red, red rose. Shakespeare compares it to a summer’s day. Love is one of the great themes in all civilizations, and variations inn music are the many ways of loving a theme—by embellishing it, elaborating on it, allowing it to veer out and experience a full range of possibilities and directions.

Themes and variations exist not only in music. Painters, novelists, and poets fix their interest on a theme, and then they patiently study it. They take it apart, put it under a microscope, look at all its components, and transform it.

Claude Monet was compelled to come back repeatedly to the cathedral in Rouen and paint it again and again as it changed nuances with the seasons and with the time of day. Each of his renditions of the cathedral is a new revelation—a new variation.

According to Leo Tolstoy, history has only two great themes—War and Peace. In all of literature there are maybe thirty great themes—the theme of Hamlet, the avenging son…Faust, making a pact with the devil for power, money…Or consider Romeo and Juliet, which metamorphoses into Black Orpheus in film, and West Side Story on Broadway—geographic and cultural variations on the theme of doomed love or star-crossed lovers. Take inventory of all the jokes you’ve heard recently, and they probably boil down to a few dozen prototypes with slightly different punch lines!

The construction of theme and variations is a process of abstraction. The composer presents a borrowed theme or his own, traditionally an eight-bar bouquet, and then proceeds to take it apart, petal by petal. He may speed it up, slow it down, invert it, and vary rhythmic patterns, melodic gestures or harmonic progressions. The variations will start close to the theme and then draft away from it, becoming less recognizable and gradually more fantastic and imaginative. At the climax, there is usually a slow variation—often in a minor key—and then the journey homeward begins. The theme, which has been through a series of adventures like the picaresque heroes Don Quixote, and Peer Gynt, reappears, wiser and with more self-knowledge. Having embarked on the same journey, we, too experience the theme differently upon its return. When we speak about the returning of theme in music, we leave behind scientific time, which moves evenly forward, and enter the realm of metaphysics, where time flows freely and turns elliptically back to its source.

Apart from the use of the form for grand or monumental works (the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, or Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Handel), it proved ideal for an entertainment genre—a light class of works based on popular songs or arias from operettas and plays. The variations provided the easy pleasure of recognition; and once a tune succeeded in catching the public ear and heart, publishers were eager to cash in on it and encourage composers (great and lesser ones) to write variations on it.

Mozart wrote a set for the old popular tune “Ah, vous dirai-je maman,” or the “ABC” song. In this case, the theme remains intact and is dressed up in various costumes, much like a child dressing a doll in different clothing or using different crayons for the same page of a coloring book. In elaborate cases like the Goldberg, the variations are progressively more removed and the exploration much more adventurous.

Beethoven similarly composed variations on “Rule Brittania” and “God Save the King.” To please the public and increase his income he used two potboilers, a rather silly ditty “I am the Tailor Cockatoo” from the light opera The Sisters from Prague by Wenzel Müller; and a rakish tune from L’Amor Marinaro—translated “Love the Sailor.” This rather crude but catchy melody was so popular that numerous composers published their variations on it. To this list, Close Encounters had added a new one by Paul Schoenfield, which premiered in our 2013 concert season. From L’Amor Marinaro to Beethoven Trio Opus 11 to Shaatnez for Ady by Schoenfield, our theme traveled the high seas and landed I the 21st century in the Berkshires, thanks to the generous patronage of Mark Berger and Bonnie Berger Leighton.

In a deeper sense we are all endless variations on the theme of a human being (there’s a blueprint up there, of which we are all approximations); and just like music, we happen in time, which makes music a mirror of our existence.

In essense, all music (all Western music) is variations on the scale. As a child, I had a moment of epiphany during chamber music coaching with Emile Hauser, the founder of the Budapest Quartet. He was quite old and could not play the violin anymore. Between movements, he sat at the piano and with a trembling hand and with a sense of wonder on his face he played a C major scale. It struck me that as he was nearing the end of his journey, he was summing up his life in music and all the myriad pieces he performed by returning to the theme—from C to glorious C.

By Yehuda Hanani, Artistic Director, Close Encounters With Music