Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56

Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56, work for two pianos, also scored in a second version for orchestra, by Johannes Brahms. The two-piano version of the work was first performed by Brahms and his dear friend Clara Schumann at a private gathering in Bonn, Germany, in August 1873. In November of that year, the orchestral version, which had evidently been prepared about the same time as the two-piano piece, was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic, with the composer conducting.

Although Brahms is often viewed as the ultimate Romantic composer, he was widely perceived by his contemporaries as hopelessly old-fashioned, looking back to old ideas rather than envisioning a bold new future. Variations on a Theme by Haydn is a fine example of his interest in earlier styles. Indeed, by the second half of the 19th century, some six decades after Joseph Haydn’s death, that Classical master’s works had largely receded from the mainstream. Even those symphonies by Haydn that have enjoyed great popularity in the 20th and 21st centuries were seldom performed in Brahms’s day.

Brahms owed much of his interest in Haydn to his friend Karl Ferdinand Pohl, scholar-librarian of the Vienna Philharmonic. Through Pohl’s influence, Brahms began serious study of the music of Haydn, and in a collection of Haydn’s wind partitas he discovered a setting of a melody known as the “St. Anthony Chorale.” That melody became the foundation of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn. (Later research revealed that the theme was not written by Haydn but most likely by one of his students.)

The variations begin with a stately melody that proceeds through eight rich reimaginings before an explosive return in its original form in the work’s grand, passacaglia-like finale. Whether the keyboard edition or the orchestral setting, Variations on a Theme by Haydn has remained one of Brahms’s most popular works. The composer himself cited it as a personal favourite.