BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
We’ve all experienced earworms – those little fragments of a melody that get stuck in our heads and remain, on repeat, for as long as we let them keep playing in there.
A well-accepted cure is for another piece of music to come along and take its place. Unless you’re a composer – in which case you embrace the earworm, and unravel it over and over until you end up with a bunch of new pieces that stem from that very first tune.
Variations on a theme are common in classical music, and these evolving melodies have become some of the best-loved pieces performed today – from Bach’s Goldberg Variations to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Despite the repetition of a theme being replayed and reworked, variations are rarely dull. On the contrary, they’re an exercise in the vast range of character and expression we can find in music.
Australian pianist Stephen McIntyre (below) is such a fan of the style that he’s presenting a concert dedicated to themes and variations, and it’ll take place in the Melbourne Recital Centre. From his perspective at the piano, “variation form is one of the great musical forms in which you can actually witness the composer at work”.
Stephen will perform the variations of Haydn, Brahms, and Rachmaninov – and he reckons they provide insight into the way these composers would think.
“All the great composers used this form, and some of the greatest masterpieces of Bach Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt are in this form,” Stephen says. All their music has a common beginning: one remarkable theme that can sustain the activity of being picked apart and pieced back together.
“To choose a good theme for variations, you need something that is relatively simple in melody, harmony, and rhythm, since these are the aspects that composers will take as their starting point.”
Haydn’s Variations in F minor gives us an example of this – and it starts to unfold through clever alterations to the rhythm.
“The harmony doesn’t change very much. But the melody is divided rhythmically into smaller note values and faster tempos with each variation,” Stephen observes; he’ll play the work in his concert.
“At no stage do we feel that we are far away from the beginning theme. And indeed, just before the closing part of the piece, Haydn gives us the theme again – although we have not forgotten it.”
The plot thickens when we come to Brahms: he stole a theme from Handel for his “adventurous…dazzling variety of variations”. In Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, you’ll be listening to melodic and rhythmic changes alike. It bounces from minor to major as the work progresses, too.
After 25 variations, Stephen says you’re given “a remarkable fugue based on the melodic intervals of the original melody”.
“Like all great composers using this form, by the end of the piece you sense that he has travelled far, but is still attached to the original structure.”
Rachmaninov (above) also loved a good earworm, and couldn’t get the theme of La Folia out of his head when he wrote Variations on a Theme of Corelli. As things have it, Corelli himself was hooked on this melody – he didn’t create it, but he also used it in over 20 variations of his own some two centuries earlier.
This is where things get a little creative: Rachmaninov dares to venture away from the original idea, bringing his own styles into the mix that can be found “at a distant remove”.
“Listening carefully as the variations develop, I think that audiences gain a great insight into the composer’s mind, and are happy to take the journey with him in the knowledge that the basis of the original theme is not too far away.”
Stephen – who has been recognised as a member of the Order of Australia for his skills in piano – will reveal his virtuosity when he plays all of these variations in the Melbourne Recital Centre. We’ll learn just as much about his interpretation as we will about the composers who created them.
We might imagine the way Stephen’s approach has itself become a variation on the countless styles and techniques he has encountered throughout his illustrious piano career.
One of those influences was found in Paris: starting out in the 1960s, he would spend Wednesday afternoons having lessons with French conductor and educator Nadia Boulanger (below) – and says the themes that underpinned this education still influence his performance today.
“These classes were held in her extraordinary home where there were several pianos, an organ, a large harp, thousands of photographs and mementos of famous musicians, and probably every piece of furniture she had ever owned,” Stephen recalls.
The lessons were named Analysis and Interpretation and, with about 20 musicians in the class, he would learn to play and sing works from Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, and Bach.
“Students in the class were expected to prepare, on a roster, the performance of some of these works, and the class then consisted of analysing and interpreting them to find out what the important elements of the composition were,” Stephen shares.
“Boulanger did this by the traditional Socratic mode of teaching – a constant barrage of questions, which gradually narrowed in focus, to the level at which she thought you had understood the point.”
One of the key themes Stephen picked up from Nadia’s lessons was a simple one: be present with the music.
“A great quality that she considered essential for a musician – not to mention for life in general – was attentiveness: the ability to be always present and concentrating on what one is doing. She thought that this enabled one to experience things profoundly. These days, she would be seen as an apostle of mindfulness.”
Stephen says it was one of the “great privileges of [his] life to have attended these classes with her”.
“These classes had a major impact on me, and much of her thinking has remained with me to this day.”
You’ll hear the impact in action when Stephen plays his hand-picked variations in the Primrose Potter Salon.
Experience Stephen McIntyre – Variations at 6pm September 18 in the Melbourne Recital Centre.
Image of Stephen supplied. Featured image via Unsplash. Historic images via Wikimedia Commons/public domain. Nadia Boulanger’s home via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY SA 4.0.
