Johannes Brahms -- Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn -- Score

Sometimes a piece of music has a very descriptive name, sometimes a name that evokes all kinds of imagery, and sometimes the name is a simple straightforward description. But sometimes you have a piece like this, with a name that's actually highly misleading. This isn't Brahms' fault, of course. The piece of music he based his variations on, a wind serenade, seems to have been attributed to Haydn, possibly to increase sales, or possibly just by accident. Modern scholarship is fairly well agreed that Haydn never wrote it, with some suggestions that it came from Ignaz Pleyel, but that isn't definitive either. Even the title of "St. Anthony Chorale" doesn't have any source before the piece Brahms started with. But regardless of where it came from, Brahms took the unusual ten-bar phrases and turned them into one of the best-known examples of an orchestral theme-and-variations.


Score sourced through the International Music Score Library Project / Petrucci Music Library: https://ks4.imslp.info/files/imglnks/...


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