Unlike the traditional “theme and variations,” Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations do not unfold as a frolicking and far-reaching episodic journey. Instead, they are unrelenting, declamatory, and haunting. The seven-note theme, equally reminiscent of Arnold Schoenberg’s tone rows and Bach’s C-sharp minor Fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 849), permeates the entire work in a way which makes it feel severely organic.
While Beethoven and Schubert improvised variations on a theme as a dazzling party trick, Leonard Bernstein used Coplands Variations at parties to “empty the room, guaranteed, in two minutes.” Bernstein described the work as “sharp as nails,” and a “synonym for modern music—so prophetic, harsh and wonderful, and so full of modern feeling and thinking.” Invoking the hard, cold texture of stone, composer Marc Blitzstein described the work as “lithic.”
Unusually, Copland composed the twenty variations out of sequence, “not knowing where or how they would eventually fit together…One fine day, when the time was right, the order of the variations fell into place.” The composer observed that the Piano Variations, completed in October of 1930, had a certain “rightness.”
In the opening, the theme is presented first as a puzzle, scattered widely over two octaves and interrupted by dry, thudding chords. Pianist Stephen Hough observes that “Variation 1 is the only time we hear the theme in its pure form, in the right hand, yet here the left hand tags along a bar behind like a shadow of discord.” The Piano Variations give us a sense of building tension, as in a horror movie involving some inexorable titanic force. Hough writes,
The short theme is ostensibly in C sharp minor/E major; but the B sharp—the note that would lead us to the tonic—has been enharmonically distorted to C natural, a foreign body to either key. This theme appears in the course of the work upside down, inside out, backwards, like a cube held up to the light from every possible angle—its ‘C’ natural a bump on its side preventing the music from settling into a comfortable place or pulse.
In 1957, in response to a commission from the Louisville Orchestra, Copland returned to this music and adapted it for large orchestra. The Orchestral Variations take on new dramatic weight and majesty. Listening to both versions, you might get the sense that you are hearing two completely different pieces.
Piano Variations
Orchestral Variations
Recordings
- Copland: Piano Variations, Daniil Trifonov Deutsche Grammophon
- Copland: Orchestral Variations, Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony Amazon
Featured Image: “Power” (c. 1933), Edward Bruce
“Nothing clears out a room like Copland’s piano variations”. I forget who said it but they weren’t wrong.