VARIATIONS pour le PIANO FORTE composées et dédieés à son ami Oliva ...Oeuvre 76 [Six Variations on a Turkish March]

Vienne: Chez Artaria et Compag. [December, 1810]. First Viennese edition. Oblong folio. Title; 2- 7pp. Engraved throughout. [PN] 2127. Scattered light foxing, corners slightly creased, else fine. Contained in a rather worn enclosure with stamped boards and a gilt leather titleplate.


A rare copy of the first Viennese edition of the variations on the familiar Turkish Marsh of the Ruins of Athens, displaying all of the composer's later style characteristics infused with humorous touches. The works is dedicated to Franz Oliva (1786 - 1848), banking clerk who served Beethoven as a part-time secretary from ca. 1809 until December 1820, when Oliva moved to St. Petersburg.


In "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," Milan Kundera had this bit to say about Beethoven variations:


“Variation form was Beethoven’s favorite toward the end of his life. At first glance, it seems the most superficial of forms, a simple showcase of musical technique, work better suited to a lacemaker than to a Beethoven. But Beethoven made it a sovereign form (for the first time in the history of music), inscribing in it his most beautiful meditations.


A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are also like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensees, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads to the other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things.


Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.


The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the wondrous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves farther and farther away form the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope." (12278)

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