ABSTRACT
An indispensable part of the amateur pianist's staple diet, the popularity of variations gave rise to a rabid demand that composers were only too eager to satisfy. Even the greatest succumbed to this rapidly burgeoning market with its rich pickings, and the lesser made much of their living from it, such as Abbé [Josef] Gelinek and Czerny, the latter with 500 to his credit. 1 The genre was extremely useful and economical: useful because it allowed the aspiring pianist the opportunity to play music by a composer in vogue on a tune in vogue without being a concert pianist; economical because the composer could turn out sets quickly and easily and because he or she could trade on the popularity of the pre-existent theme. Given consumer demand, the conservatism of most of these works is to be expected, a compound of the familiar and the fashionably 'new'.
