Composer: born May 7, 1833, Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, Vienna
Work composed: Brahms composed these variations during the spring and summer of 1873, and played the two-piano version with Clara Schumann in rehearsal in Bonn on August 21 of that year
World premiere: Brahms conducted the Vienna Philharmonic on November 2, 1873.

Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, triangle, and strings

Estimated duration: 19 minutes

In the autumn of 1870, Carl Ferdinand Pohl, a scholar working on a biography of Joseph Haydn, showed his friend Johannes Brahms an unpublished score for a wind ensemble Haydn had composed sometime around 1782. The second movement was titled “St. Anthony Chorale.”

The source of this melody remains a mystery, but scholars have definitively established Haydn did not write it (nor, as it happens, did Haydn compose the wind ensemble Pohl discovered, either). Some historians suggest the St. Anthony melody originated in the state of Burgenland, in eastern Austria, or that it was a popular religious melody sung on the Feast Day of St. Anthony of Padua. Others credit Haydn’s student, Ignaz Pleyel, with authorship.

Brahms decided to use the St. Anthony Chorale as an exercise in orchestration, to hone his compositional skills as he also worked on his first symphony. For Brahms, this expansive tune with its odd five-measure phrases was ideally suited to the theme with variations format with which he was quite familiar. Between 1854 and 1863, Brahms had composed variations on themes of Robert Schumann, George Frideric Handel, and Niccolò Paganini, all for piano. Interestingly, although the theme and variations genre is a staple of solo piano repertoire, orchestral variations like these were virtually nonexistent prior to 1873.

Theme and variation allows for a variety of compositional approaches, ranging from simple to florid. In a letter to his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, Brahms opined,“I sometimes ponder on variation form, and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer. Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme as their real subject … But it seems to me that a great many moderns (including both of us) are more inclined – I don’t know how to put it – to fuss about with the theme. We cling nervously to the melody, but we don’t handle it freely, we don’t really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it. And so the melody becomes quite unrecognizable.”

Brahms began with a simple statement of the St. Anthony melody followed by eight variations and a powerful finale. The variations alternate between rich harmonic explorations – venturing into minor keys on occasion – and expansions of the melody’s innate majestic qualities. The closing variation is a magnificent passacaglia, a Baroque form of variations on the chorale’s bass line. Essentially a set of variations within the variations, the finale serves as Brahms’ musical wink to the contrapuntal and puzzle-loving style of J. S. Bach.

The musically conservative critic Eduard Hanslick, a fan of Brahms’ music, wrote an encouraging, if flowery, review of the first performance in Vienna: “Brahms seems to us now like a robust tree standing in full sap, whose green branches are stretching ever higher and wider, bearing ever more abundant, sweeter fruits.”