Ballada, Op.16

Vianna da Motta is remembered above all as a pianist. He was a pupil of Scharwenka, Liszt, and Bülow and is himself credited with having developed the Portuguese school of piano playing during his nineteen years as director of the Lisbon Conservatoire. But he was also a conductor and, as befits a friend and colleague of Busoni, a generally thoughtful musician, writer and composer.

Bearing in mind what is known of him as a pianist - there are some distinguished Chopin, Liszt and Busoni recordings - one might expect his own music to be late-romantic virtuoso stuff little different from that of many of his contemporaries. In fact, while some of it is certainly late-romantic and virtuoso in style, there is also a strong, deliberately cultivated Portuguese element in it - not only in his choral epic Lusiads but also in piano works like the Portuguese Scenes and Portuguese Rhapsodies. The Ballada, which was written in 1905, is based on a Portuguese song - Tricana d’aldeia (“Village Girl”) - which is introduced in a solemn F sharp minor in the opening bars. Far from treating it as Chopin or Liszt might have done in their ballades, Vianna da Motta makes it the basis of a series of variations. In the first three it is developed as in a chaconne or passacaglia, which is to say that it remains basically the same while the decorative material above or below it varies in manner and texture - an expressive legato figuration in the first, forceful triplets in the quicker second, a caressing counterpoint in the nostalgic F sharp major third variation (con un sentimento di “saudade”). The fourth variation is a kind of scherzo with the rhythm of the theme evened out in staccato quavers and the fifth is a full-scale display of pianistic heroism.

The surprise of the Ballada is that, rather than ending just there in F sharp minor where it began, it melts into a very quiet and rapturous coda recalls another folk song, an Ave Maria in F sharp major, all but forgetting the main theme until its diagnostic falling fifths reappear in low left-hand octaves in the closing bars.