Variations on a Nursery Song, Op. 25
Ernő Dohnányi (1877-1960) Born in Hungary, Ernő Dohnányi was an international concert pianist, composer, conductor, teacher and Director of the Budapest Conservatory (1919), Hungarian Radio (1931), and the Berlin Hochschule (1934). He retained various positions during the Second World War, then moved to the USA to become Professor of Piano at Florida State College in 1949. An impressive CV for sure, but he would be virtually forgotten were it not for these Variations. The introduction, Theme, 13 variations and a coda are squeezed into a work of about 20 minutes duration, so there is plenty of incident. The French version of the theme, Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman, was used by Mozart as the basis for variations in 1778, for solo piano. The English version comes in two forms: ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’, and ‘Baa baa black sheep’. Dohnányi’s melody matches ‘Twinkle, twinkle’, but the ‘...have you any wool...’ phrase is used within some of the variations, so there is a bit of each. Beyond a few subtle hints, we have no idea that such a banal ditty is going to become the hero of the piece. Well, we do have an idea, really, because it’s in the title of the work and this description is rubbing it in. Even so, Dohnányi invites us to suspend our disbelief while the orchestra, tongue in cheek, offers a portentous and bombastic introduction, followed by a childlike statement of the theme on the piano. Most of the variations whizz by, causing even attentive listeners to lose count. It doesn’t matter because, together, they offer a light-hearted tour of music as she was once known: listen out for parodies of Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Claude Debussy. Spot the march, the waltz, the chorale, the fugue and other well-known musical genres; and try to capture the connections between the variations and the nursery song, sometimes teasingly disguised. The heart of the work is the slow and extended tenth variation, which sets out as a passacaglia, characterised by a repeating motif in the bass, itself a bare outline of the nursery tune. Huge crescendos, complex fugal writing and more, suddenly yield to the simplicity of the original melody and the first variation. A short coda sees this odd adventure out of the door with a firm slam. Today, audiences enjoy the musical joke underlying the work, but in Dohnányi’s time it was judged by a few to be heavy-handed. ‘It wears out after one or two hearings’, complained Eric Blom. Dohnányi himself had no problem. He dedicated the work ‘...to the enjoyment of lovers of humour and to the annoyance of others’. Blom was clearly among the others. Tickled or not by the intended joke, discerning listeners should take delight in the loving partnership between the soloist and the orchestra, and the subtlety of phrase-length and tonality, causing what actually happens to be rather different from what one might expect to happen. Although the music’s progress seems always to be inevitable, it is never predictable. Why is Dohnányi’s music neglected today? These variations reveal sharp awareness of musical trends of about 100 years ago, when it was written. In 1914, it would have sounded reasonably modern but certainly not revolutionary. Other composers were more modern. Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály (both of whom studied under the same teacher as Dohnányi) captured the wilder spirit of Hungarian folk music – a genre of no apparent interest to him. If Dohnányi missed that cultural bus, he missed another as well: the exploration of dissonance as pursued by Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, albeit in ways different from each other. Despite these reservations about the composer, the Variations themselves are full of vitality with moments of compositional virtuosity, matched by impressive technical feats from the soloist. And it’s a pretty good musical joke as well. |
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