Ten Variations on a Prelude by Chopin BV213a (1884–1922)

At the age of 18, when he was already famous as a virtuoso pianist and extensively published as a composer, Busoni started work on what was to be issued a year later as Variations and Fugue in Free Form on Chopin’s C miinor Prelude, Op.22. Clearly intended as the ambitious young composer’s answer to Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a theme by Handel, it is a sensational score of such difficulty that it must have been a formidable challenge even to Busoni himself.

Looking at the Chopin Variations 17 years later he didn’t much like what he saw: “They are not worth saving,” he said. Ten years later again, however, when he was collecting material for a vast compendium of his work to be known as the Clavierübung, he found that – “tormented by their formal deficiiences” though he was – they were not actually beyond redemption. He dropped the fugue, cut all but a few of the original 18 variations, rewrote others and supplied new ones. The revised version, he said, was “freed from heaviness and more rounded in form… Scarcely a trace of ‘depth’ or ‘meaningfulness’ but hopefully fun to play and entertaining.”

A curious feature of the present version is that it begins with what Busoni described as a “Faustian” introduction – four bars which treat the opening phrase of Chopin’s theme in canon and in harmonies which the 18-year-old Busoni would have found incomprehensible. Even so, representative of the mature Busoni’s progressive thinking though it is, he liked the new introduction so much that he hoped pianists would use it to introduce the original version too. He then presents the Prelude in C minor (which Rachmaninov was to choose as the theme of his Variations Op.22 in 1912) much as it appears in Chopin’s Op.28. The first two variations – a steady procession of chords in the right hand over rising thirds in the left, skittering triplets mischievously set against a motif in duplets – are clearly derived from the early version. The third, however, which is a study in bell-like sonorities, is new. The fourth, its melodic line in even minims poised over arpeggios, survives from the early version, as does the fifth with its rumbling semiquaver octaves, although they are well separated from each other in the original.

The centre piece in both cases, headed Fantasia here, is presented in the improvisatory manner of a concerto cadenza. Lyyical melody mingles with thematic allusions, some quoting directly from the Chopin Prelude, scherzando material and episodes of sheer bravura in a kaleidoscope of fragmentary variations. In the newly written Scherzo finale driving tarantella rhythms are interrupted by an affectionate pastiche of a Chopin waltz (“Hommage à Chopin”) before they are recalled to secure a thunderous ending.