ABSTRACT

Paganini.” Written for solo piano, the Paganini “Variations” are a masterful set designed to present a variety of shapes and colors, all generated from the same core theme, the twenty-fourth caprice of the Italian violinist, composer and romantic figure of satanic debauchery. The genius of Brahms, in addition to a superhuman melodic inventiveness, is that no two variations have the same style, the resulting totality a marvelous survey of musical thought from the Baroque to the modern, from the concert hall to the salon, from the palace to the whorehouse (where Brahms himself spent his early years at the piano bench). However, most modern pianists, educated in the conservatory system, have little clue as to musical style or period and their resulting “variants” sound like so many repetitions of similar thematic material. Virtually all of the musical thought that Brahms put into this composition is lost to modern fingers (and, in time, to modern ears) and the resulting performances are tedious and bland (since the composer spent so much effort on the nuances of style, he keeps the music almost exclusively revolving around the same key of A Minor). Even the most adept at striking the individual notes leave out the most important element: the music itself.