Variations and Fugue On A Theme By Handel - Background

Background

The Handel Variations were written in September 1861 after Brahms, aged 28, abandoned the work he had been doing as director of the Hamburg women's choir (Frauenchor) and moved out of his family's cramped and shabby apartments in Hamburg to his own apartment in the quiet suburb of Hamm, initiating a highly productive period that produced "a series of early masterworks". Written in a single stretch in September 1861, the work is dedicated to a "beloved friend", Clara Schumann, widow of Robert Schumann, Brahms's musical and personal mentor. It was presented to her on her 42nd birthday, September 13. At about the same time, his interest in, and mastery of, the piano also shows in his writing two important piano quartets, in G minor and A major. Barely two months later, in November 1861, he produced his second set of Schumann Variations, Op. 23, for piano four hands.

From his earliest years as a composer, the variation was a musical form of great interest to Brahms. Before the Handel Variations he had written a number of other sets of variations, as well as using variations in the slow movement of his Op. 1, the Piano Sonata in C major, and in other chamber works. As he appeared on the scene, variations were in decline, "little more than a basis for writing paraphrases of favorite tunes". In Brahms's work the form once again became restored to greatness.

Brahms had been emulating Baroque models for six years or more. In particular, between the time he wrote his previous Two Sets of Variations for piano, (No. 1, Eleven Variations on an Original Theme, in D major (1857) and No. 2, Fourteen Variations on a Hungarian Melody, in D major (1854)), Op. 21, and the Handel Variations, Op. 24, Brahms did a careful study of "more rigorous, complex and historical models, among others preludes, fugues, canons and the then obscure dance movements of the Baroque period. Two gigues and two sarabandes that Brahms wrote to develop his technique are extant today. The results of these historical studies are seen in, obviously, his choice of Handel for the theme, as well as his use of Baroque forms, including the Siciliano dance form (Var. 19) from the French school of Couperin and, in general, the frequent use of contrapuntal techniques in many variations.

One aspect of his approach to variation writing is made explicit in a number of letters. "In a theme for a variations, it is almost only the bass that has any meaning for me. But this is sacred to me, it is the firm foundation on which I then build my stories. What I do with a melody is only playing around ... If I vary only the melody, then I cannot easily be more than clever or graceful, or, indeed, full of feeling, deepen a pretty thought. On the given bass, I invent something actually new, I discover new melodies in it, I create." The role of the bass is critical.

Identifying the bass as the essence of the theme, ...Brahms advocated using it to control the structure and character of individual variations and of the entire set. But by this he apparently did not mean retaining in the variations the bass line of the theme or even its harmonies ... To invent something actually new and to discover new melodies in the bass give the bass a role at once passive and active. While maintaining the structure of the theme—the passive bass, so to speak—Brahms may actively create melodies and figurative patterns (including melodies "discovered in" the bass), project different contrapuntal textures, and draw on an expanded harmonic vocabulary, sometimes interpreting the melody as the bass of the harmony or regarding major and minor or sharp and flat versions of the same passage as equally valid and available. The result is a great diversity of expression and character founded on a relatively strict conception of the "given" material.

Brahms also took into careful account the character of the theme, and its historical context. Unlike the great model of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, where the variations departed widely from the character of the theme, Brahms's variations expressed and developed the character of the theme. Because the theme for the Handel variations originated in the Baroque era, Brahms included forms such as a siciliana, a musette, a canon and, of course, a fugue.

Still not fully established in his career in 1861, Brahms had to struggle to get the work published. He wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel, "I am unwilling, at the first hurdle, to give up my desire to see this, my favourite work, published by you. If therefore, it is primarily the high fee that stops you taking it, I will be happy to let you have it for 12 Friedrichsdors or, if this still seems too high, 10 Friedrichsdors. I very much hope you will not think I plucked the initial fee arbitrarily out of the air. I consider this work to be much better than my earlier ones; I think it is also much better adapted to the demands of performance and will therefore be easier to market ..."

The theme of the Handel Variations is taken from an aria in the third movement of Handel's Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B-flat Major, HWV 434 (Suites de pièces pour le clavecin, published by J. Walsh, London 1733 with five variations). Brahms himself owned a copy of the 1733 First Edition. The appeal of the aria for Brahms might have been its simplicity: its range is restricted to one octave; the harmony is plain, with every note taken from the B-flat major scale; it "made an admirably neutral starting-place". While Handel had written only five variations on his theme, Brahms, with the piano as his instrument rather than the more limited harpsichord, enlarged the scope of his opus to 25 variations ending with an extended fugue. Brahms's use of Handel exemplifies his love of the music of the past and his tendency to incorporate it and transform it in his own compositions.

Of the overall concept of the work, Malcolm MacDonald writes "Some of Brahms's models in this monumental work are easy enough to identify. In the scale and ambition of his conception both Bach's 'Goldberg' and Beethoven's 'Diabelli Variations' must have exercised a powerful if generalized influence; in specific features of form Beethoven's 'Eroica' Variations is a closer parallel. But the overall structure is original to Brahms." And MacDonald suggests what might have been a more contemporary source of inspiration, the Variations on a Theme of Handel, Op. 26, by Robert Volkmann. "Brahms might well have known that large and often admirable work, published as recently as 1856, which Volkmann based on the so-called 'Harmonious Blacksmith' theme from the Air with Variations in Handel's E major Harpsichord Suite."