Piano Variations

Leonard Bernstein guaranteed that he “could empty a room in two minutes by playing this wonderful piece.” Copland himself included it among his “hard-bitten” works, along with two other scores written during the Depression in the early 1930s, Statements for Orchestra and the Short Symphony. And yet, while declaring it “as hard as nails,” Bernstein confessed himself “a lover, a fanatical lover” of the Piano Variations. Copland too exprressed his affection for it, if in less lyrical terms. “From the start,” he said, “it had a ‘rightness.’ The piece flowed naturally and never seemed to get ‘stuck,’ although I worked on it for about two years, off an on.” He was aware of “a certain amount of contemporary reality” in it… “Frugality and economy were the order of the day.”

The economy of the Piano Variations is such that it is based on a theme of just four notes. “Almost every note and every chord in the piece,” Copland said, “relates back to those four notes.” Since that small melodic cell contains mainly dissonant intervals, the melodies derived from it are predominantly angular in shape and the harmonies predominantly austere (though not, in the end, atonal). On the other hand, the stark clarity of the textures, the brilliance of the piano writing, the rhythmic ingenuity and the dramatic orientation of the work ensure that it will hold the attention for rather more than Bernstein’s two minutes.

There are twenty variations in all, each one merging into the next in an unbroken continuity. Broadly, however, there are two main sections of ten variations each: the first accelerates from the Grave tempo in which the theme is presented in the opening bars and then falls back to Largamente in the tenth variation; the mainly quick second section runs by way of a witty little scherzo to a climax at the end of the twentieth variation, where it is forcibly arrested by another Largamente in the declamatory coda.

Walter Gieseking having declined the honour - “I do not know an audience which would accept such crude dissonances without protest” - the first performance was given by Copland himself in a League of Composers concert in New York in 1931.