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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Nebraska Press
Among all the tools we have to understand Brahms as a variation composer, the most important is the music itself. In this context, his Variations on a Hungarian Song, op. 21, no. 2, has been woefully underexplored--and this despite a tantalizing array of unica.(1) It is Brahms's only freestanding variation set based on a folk melody. It presents unique evidence of how the young Brahms struggled to impose macroformal order on a large variation group. Its brilliant coda is Brahms's first known encounter with the variation finale. It is also Brahms's first thoroughgoing attempt to employ the Hungarian idioms for which he was later to become celebrated.(2) Furthermore, the Hungarian Song Variations have a unique manuscript history that has up to now been largely unexplored. Although multiple settings of the theme are preserved in Brahms's hand, they have never been assembled and compared. Moreover, Brahms's single, heavily revised autograph of the completed variations can now be compared with an earlier Abschrift, made in August 1856 by Clara Schumann, that came to light only in 1981. The sources have much to reveal about the work and the work itself much to reveal about Brahms as a variation composer.(3)
Because op. 21, no. 2, has been so little discussed in the literature, my priority here has been to create a stable informational environment in which to evaluate its significance for Brahms as a variation composer. This includes, of course, exploring the manuscript sources of the theme and its variations and examining discussions of the work in Brahms's correspondence. I believe that it is also important to consider another collection of "sources"--those works to which Brahms clearly alludes in the course of the variations. This collection may be quite incomplete as it depends on my knowledge of the variation literature and on my way of hearing allusion in Brahms's music. At least, however, most of these allusions are so plainly drawn as to be uncontroversial, and they are important because they help establish a larger referential context for the piece. I do not choose to explore their possible psychological or autobiographical implications but focus strictly on their technical importance as a small pantheon of works that influenced Brahms's applications of variation procedure and form in this work.
I
To begin with, why variations on a Hungarian song? After all, virtually all of Brahms's freestanding variation sets--the Handel Variations, the Paganini Variations, the two sets of Schumann variations, the Haydn Variations--were written on themes borrowed from past masters. His only other freestanding variation work, op. 21, no. 1, was based on a theme of his own. For Brahms to lavish attention on a nondescript Hungarian folk melody seems, in this context, massively incongruous.
Michael Struck has explored the immediate origin of the Hungarian Song Variations, showing that they were composed late in 1856, as an offshoot of Brahms's counterpoint studies with Joseph Joachim.(4) In a packet of contrapuntal exercises dated 30 April 1856, Joachim had included a single variation on an Irish Elfenlied. When Brahms asked to see more variations, Joachim responded with a packet dated the following 16 June. Brahms sent a critique of these additional variations in a reply of 22 June. Although this exchange led Joachim to develop his variation exercises into a serious composition, he ultimately left the work unfinished and unpublished.(5) Brahms was led into fresh thinking about variation composition, however, and, after Joachim had left off work on the Elfenlied variations, composed his own set on a Hungarian song. This he sent to Joachim at the end of 1856.
Struck notes several points of contact between Joachim's and Brahms's variations. Both works are based on short folk songs with a strong national identity. Both were "cyclically conceived," with their variations grouped into large sections by key and tempo. Most to the point, both can be seen as homage compositions. In his eleventh variation, Joachim quoted the opening of the Andante of Brahms's op. 5 piano sonata, while Brahms's choice of theme, in Struck's view, honored Joachim's Hungarian heritage.
Nevertheless, Brahms's selection of the Hungarian song as a theme also needs to be placed in a wider context. What kinds of themes were commonly used for variations at mid-century? How did Brahms's choice fit into this general scheme of things? Adolf Hofmeister's Handbuch der musikalischen Literatur is especially well suited to provide this kind of perspective. The period covered by Hofmeister's first Erganzungsband (1844-51) corresponds approximately with Brahms's period of composition and piano study with his Hamburg mentor, Eduard Marxsen; that covered by the second (1852-59), with the composing of his first ten published opera as well as several pieces published later, including op. 21.(6) Hofmeister lists 1,506 composers of solo piano works in this second period. Among these, 142 published one or more sets of freestanding variations.(7) Of these 256 works, themes from the opera literature appear 62 times and reflect the immense mid-century popularity of Verdi as well as an enduring affection for Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Weber, and Meyerbeer. Nearly as numerous are the 54 folksong variations.(8) The types of folk song most frequently encountered are Tyrolean (9), Hungarian or Bohemian (8), Russian (6), German (5), Russian-Bohemian (4), and Swiss (4). Variations on original themes, by contrast, were relatively rare, 14 in number. (Twelve variation sets were on unidentified themes, some of which could also be original.) Other variations were based on patriotic songs, such as "God Save the King," popular genre pieces, such as mazurkas or polkas, or popular songs, such as "The Last Rose of Summer" or even the American "Yankee Doodle." These statistics reflect larger currents in piano literature. Rondos and character pieces were often based on themes from operas or on folk material, while original compositions, such as sonatas, scherzos, or groups of character pieces, were somewhat less common.
The nineteenth-century piano literature was, however, particularly susceptible to changes in musical fashion. Hofmeister's catalog for the previous period (1844-51) shows significantly different patterns in the variation literature. Of nearly a thousand composers of solo piano music listed, more than 140 wrote freestanding variation sets. Among 342 such works, the 137 variations on themes from operas by far predominated. While Verdi, Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti, and Meyerbeer are well represented, most themes came from operas by composers such as Auber, Carafa, Proch, Flotow, Balfe, Alieneff, Masse, Lortzing, Halevy, Adam, Ricci, and Mehul, none of whose themes appear in the 1852-59 listings. The 42 variations on folk songs were dominated by Tyrolean (9), Hungarian or Bohemian (8), German (4), and Swiss (4) themes. Again, variations on original themes were relatively rare, 15 in number. (Some of the 16 unattributable themes may be original.) Among the remainder, variations on genre compositions (e.g., nocturnes, polkas, mazurkas) and composed lieder were somewhat more common than in the 1852-59 listings.
In the 1840s, then, when Brahms was a young student of Marxsen in Hamburg, variation themes from the opera literature were much more fashionable than in the following decade. Folk songs were the second most popular themes for variations in both periods but gained significantly in popularity in the 1850s, while themes from opera were on the wane. The most popular types of folk song for variations in both periods were Tyrolean and Hungarian/Bohemian. This overview would tend to suggest that, whatever his other reasons for choosing a Hungarian song as the theme for a set of variations, the genre was in fashion, and Brahms was participating in the trend. This is decidedly not the case for any of his other freestanding variation sets. The companion piece of the Hungarian Song Variations, the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 21, no. 1, falls into a relatively unpopular category for the time, and variations on instrumental themes by past masters are so rare in Hofmeister's listings that they could hardly be said to represent a viable category of variation writing at all.(9) Brahms's predilection for such themes, and indeed for themes already used by their own composers or by others for variations, seems, in this context, to be nearly unique. It is a stance at once conservative and bold. These were "safe" themes, in the sense that they were guaranteed by pedigree to be good for variation writing. One is reminded of Schoenberg's remark, "It is not easy to write a good original theme for variation. It may, therefore, be useful to select a theme whose suitability has already been proved, in sets of variations by such masters as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven."(10) But Brahms was also as much as saying that he could do something more with a theme that Handel, for example, had exhausted, and it is telling that he never wrote variations on themes by Beethoven or J. S. Bach, whom he most admired as variation composers.
Hofmeister's catalogs also show that certain composers tended to specialize in variations on one or another type of theme. Among those with a particular affinity for folk-song materials were some of the most popular salon composers of the 1840s, Henri Herz, Leopold Meyer, and Rudolf Willmers.(11) In the 1850s, the list would grow to include less well-known musicians such as Franz Gretscher or Albert Jungemann and piano pedagogues such as Louis Kohler and Brahms's own teacher, Eduard Marxsen, who had a special predilection for writing variations on folk themes, generally Russian, Styrian, Finnish, and German melodies.(12) Significantly, Brahms's earliest collection of folk materials, containing mostly short, simple melodies of German, Finnish, Lapplandish, Scottish, and other origins, probably dates from the time when he was Marxsen's student.(13) And, as suggested by ex. 3.1, which pairs the theme from a set of variations by Marxsen entitled Die Kantele Spielerin, op. 67, no. 2, and a Finnische Rune from Brahms's early folksong collection, the young Brahms seems to have been attracted to the same kinds of folk materials that his teacher used as themes for variations, with their brevity, plain reiteration of melodic/rhythmic cells, and simple harmonic plans. Karl Geiringer notes, in fact, that the theme of Marxsen's Kochersberger Bauerntanz: Altdeutsches Volkslied mit zwolf Veranderungen, op. 67, no. 1, resembles the theme of the Hungarian Song Variations in its alternation of 34 and 4 meters.(14) While the melodies chosen by Joachim and Brahms for their variation writing in 1856 were slightly more complex than these, they still belong to the radically simple world of folk expression that Brahms explored under Marxsen's tutelage.(15)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
That Brahms's choice of a simple folk song as the theme for a set of variations might be connected with his teacher's compositional interests presents a fundamentally different reason than that suggested by Struck for why Brahms might have composed the piece. If one can set aside the op. 9 variations as a Herculean accomplishment inspired by Robert Schumann's attempted suicide and Brahms's growing love for Clara, then the Hungarian Song Variations appear in a new light.(16) They would seem to be a reflexive action, a return to interests developed under the influence of his teacher. This perspective accords well with Brahms's frame of mind at the time they were composed. His counterpoint exercises with Joachim were part of an impulse toward study and preparation that he had undertaken at least partly in response to the high expectations aroused by Robert Schumann's celebrated "Neue Bahnen" article.(17) In fact, it was arguably in the year 1856 that he was at the nadir of his confidence as a young composer. In this context, it would be logical for him to begin an autodidactic project on variation writing using simple folk materials, returning, as it were, to where he had left off with Marxsen.
This scenario comports well with the hesitant, insecure ruminations about variation composition that Brahms confided to Joachim in the summer of 1856, as a preamble to his critique of Joachim's Elfenlied variations:
I sometimes contemplate the variation form and think it must be kept purer, stricter. The old masters retain the bass of the theme strictly throughout, its actual theme. With Beethoven the melody, the harmony, and the rhythm are so beautifully varied. But I must sometimes find that the new generation (both of us) mills around the theme more (I don't know the right expression). We anxiously retain the melody but do not treat it freely, actually create nothing new out of it, but only load it down. But therefore the melody is not at all recognizable. I do not even understand what I have written here.(18)
This passage is often interpreted as the young Brahms's credo about variation writing, but what it really communicates is insecurity and confusion. It is a lamentation, not a proclamation. In this context, the Hungarian Song Variations may be seen as a work in which Brahms backed away from the elaborate, complex op. 9 variations and deliberately began over again as a variation composer, working with a simple folk song as he had done with Marxsen. What would emerge proved to be a Janus-faced mixture of the studied and the bold, a work that looks backward to his youthful tutorials and forward to the great series of variation works to come.
II
The theme itself Brahms almost certainly learned in January 1853 from the expatriate Hungarian violinist, Eduard Remenyi.(19) Remenyi's concert programs invariably concluded with what he called Ungarische Lieder--popular Hungarian songs or dances.(20) It seems to have been with these pieces that he made the best impression, and so it is reasonable to believe that, when Brahms began to serve as his regular accompanist early in 1853, Remenyi would have gone to some lengths to teach him the Hungarian style.
It is probably owing to Brahms's enthusiasm for collecting examples of folk music that several versions of the theme of the Hungarian Song Variations have been preserved in his hand. Presented chronologically in ex. 3.2, they reveal some of the compositional issues with which Brahms dealt as he transformed the theme from a received artifact into an art-music product.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Brahms copied the theme as it appears in ex. 3.2a, along with one other Hungarian melody, in the lower margin of a sheet on which he had previously written down the motet "Vere languores," by Antonio Lotti. The date of the entry, 17 January 1853, establishes this as Brahms's earliest surviving notation of a Hungarian folk melody.(21) Except for the F# in m. 7, it can be easily played on the violin. Since it also uses characteristic string articulations, it is probably close to a transcription from Remenyi's playing.
In ex. 3.2b, the theme appears as the second of three Hungarian melodies, now arranged for piano, on a Widmungsblatt dated April 1853 that Brahms and Remenyi inscribed to Joachim. Since the two were then in the midst of the concert tour that lifted Brahms from obscurity in Hamburg and brought him to the attention of Joachim, Liszt, and the Schumanns, these melodies probably were included on their concerts.(22) The capital letter B that concludes the Hungarian song theme is a characteristic flourish found at the end of many early Brahms manuscripts. It ordinarily embellishes only finished works, so its appearance here should be read as a kind of imprimatur of originality, as if Brahms were saying, "This is how I play it."
Ex. 3.2c gives the theme only as a melodic incipit. It is found on a roughly copied, undated sheet that contains numbered incipits of all the Hungarian melodies found in other Brahms sources that can be dated to the mid-1850s. The sheet was probably therefore an informal thematic catalog of the Hungarian tunes Brahms knew at the time.(23)
A selection of ten of these melodies found their way into a larger, more formal manuscript entitled "Volksweisen" that Brahms presented to Clara Schumann on 8 June 1854, Robert Schumann's forty-fourth birthday.(24) That spring, Brahms had entertained Clara privately by playing from his folk-music collections. It is most likely that this manuscript records some of the informal renditions of those evenings.(25) The Hungarian song theme stands at the beginning of the section headed "Ungrische Volksweisen," suggesting, perhaps, that it had attracted Clara's attention in some particular way. As seen in ex. 3.2d, it was apparently copied directly from the source transcribed in ex. 3.2a and is thus the only Hungarian melody in this source not scored on a grand staff. Its differentiated treatment here may show a seed of interest on Brahms's part in the authenticity of its original presentation. (He had, after all, made his own piano arrangement earlier.) It may also suggest that he considered its original bass line sufficiently interesting to retain.
It is unlikely that Brahms would have copied out these materials for Clara and presented them to her on such an important occasion if she had not shown real interest in them and if they had not had great musical value for him. Thus, by the time he chose this melody as a theme for variations, it had acquired significant personal resonances for him: his early acquaintance with the Gypsy style and the concert tour with Remenyi, his first meeting with Joachim, and, perhaps most poignantly, his memories of music making with Clara Schumann in the summer of 1854.
The next extant version of the theme, transcribed in ex. 3.2e, is found in the earliest surviving manuscript of the variations, an Abschrift made by Clara Schumann for Julius Otto Grimm that is dated August 1857.(26) Comparison with ex. 3.2d shows how Brahms altered the original bass as he shaped the presentation of the theme that would head the variations. He omitted the F# in m. 1, leaving the opening of the first phrase monophonic, and thereby matching the opening of the second phrase in m. 5. At the same time, leaving the implied bass on D throughout m. focused more attention on the triadic movement of the bass in m. 2, allowing it to emerge as a kind of plagal imitation of the opening motive of the theme. Brahms's revision of the bass in m. 3 seems to have had two priorities: to place the V on beat 1 in root position and to approach the B on beat 3 in a linear descent from D. This provides a hint of "horn fifths" on beat 1, subtly reflecting the Kraftig character of the theme, and then gives better contrary motion with the melody. (Note the more overt horn fifths in m. 6 of the Widmungsblatt version.) Brahms followed the original in omitting the bass in m. 5, something he had not done in the Widmungsblatt. In m. 6, he shows a preference for strong, root-position harmonies on beats 1-3, while, on beat 4, he makes a striking change, writing a passing E in the bass that allows the F# of m. 7 to arrive an octave higher, relatively speaking, than in the original. It will become clear that this revision was probably texture driven. Brahms retained the original bass in the last two measures, except for the A in m. 8, which he altered to F#. He must have objected to the awkward cadential six-four, which is not approached conventionally--that is, by step in the bass--from m. 7. (But compare the Widmungsblatt reading!)(27) Thus, Brahms did not write an entirely new bass for the theme but substantially retained the original, altering it only where it was weak or where some significant advantage could be gained. There are even points--the third beat of m. 1 and the entirety of m. 5--where the bass Brahms eventually settled on is closer to Remenyi's original than to the Widmungsblatt. This may suggest that the original bass was for Brahms a kind of talisman of Remenyi's presentation of the theme, something that gained in value because of its authenticity.
Further comparison of the Abschrift with the Widmungsblatt invites a focus on texture. The Widmungsblatt vacillates between a single-note bass line and a bass doubled in octaves, between a conventional four-part-harmony texture and segments in two, three, or five contrapuntal parts. The melody shifts abruptly up an octave in the middle of the third phrase.(28) There is a chaotic, indecisive quality about all this, as if Brahms could not make up his mind about a consistent approach to texture for the whole.
In the Abschrift, Brahms by no means got rid of this textural diversity. Instead, he organized it. The entire melody now lies in the upper octave register. Measures 1 and 5 are set essentially in a single-line treble texture with octave doublings, mm. 2 and 6 in a much larger texture, with full right-hand chords and left-hand octaves in the bass. Measures 3 and 7 employ a fluid, treble texture with fleeting octave doublings of parts but with no bare-octave doubling of the bass. Measures 4 and 8 return to the full textures of mm. 2 and 6. Clearly, Brahms decided to use texture to reinforce the accented quarters in the ?? measures, probably to emphasize the alternating triple and quadruple meters of the theme. But his textural organization was in fact even more thoroughgoing, for the order of textures is now the same in mm. 1-4 as in mm. 5-8. (The ascending approach to the high B in the bass of m. 7, a striking revision of the original bass mentioned above, allows its texture to run parallel to that of m. 3.) Therefore, Brahms's reorganization of the chaotic Widmungsblatt texture ultimately serves to delineate the two-measure and four-measure phrase structure of the theme.
The original ink layer of Brahms's autograph (ex. 3.2f) shows subtle changes of texture from the Abschrift in mm. 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 that constitute a refining stage in the revision process.(29) In m. 3, for example, the soprano-tenor doubling of the melody on beat 1 is retained in both versions, but the inner voice leading in the autograph provides a different sonority from that of the Abschrift. The first edition combines these readings (ex. 3.2g). Whereas in mm. 6 and 7 Brahms doubled the bass in octaves in the Abschrift, he removed those doublings in the autograph, achieving a slightly thinner texture and a more contrapuntal one, in that it is easier to pick out the tenor as an independent voice. The autograph version of m. 8 likewise yields a less massive sound than the Abschrift and allows the alto voice to emerge. All these readings were carried over into the first edition.
The revision patterns of the theme are typical of the piece as a whole in that many readings in the Abschrift are texturally thicker and less contrapuntally differentiated than those in the original ink layer of the autograph, and the first edition in most cases follows the autograph readings.(30) Margit McCorkle has interpreted this as a tendency "to simplify the chord structures" of the music in order to make it more accessible "for use by `dilettantes.'"(31) To be sure, Brahms put the op. 21 variations forward to his publisher, P.J. Simrock, as "not very difficult" and "very easily playable, even for dilettantes." But in doing so he was probably trying to address difficulties in the Variations on an Original Theme (op. 21, no. 1), which are challenging to play and for which he supplied several ossias.(32) The revision patterns in the Hungarian Song Variations do not, in fact, appreciably affect their playability. Rather, they are evidence of a stage of refinement in Brahms's compositional process in which he subtly altered the details of voice doubling and texture so that the music would gain in contrapuntal clarity.(33)
Brahms's work on the initial presentation of the theme, in sum, lies in three areas--revision of the bass, organization of the texture, and clarification of counterpoint. This work had ramifications for the variations that followed. Consider, for example, the bass at the last cadence of the theme. In the Widmungsblatt, the final bass tone, D, falls on beat 3, whereas, in the original setting and in the Abschrift, it falls on beat 4. Variations 1, 2, and 3 follow the Abschrift pattern, whereas variations 4, 5, and 6 follow the Widmungsblatt variant. The hint of opening imitation in variation 4 is an old strategy first deployed in mm. 1-2 of the theme as found in the Abschrift. The prominent horn fifths in variation 2 echo experiments in m. 6 of the Widmungsblatt presentation and m. 3 of the autograph. Most telling of all, the textural organization of the theme in the Abschrift underlies the textures of variations 2 and 4. As he composed the variations, it seems, Brahms's earlier work on...
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