6 Variações sobre um tema de Kozeluch
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 1817
- Publisher
- Musica Brasilis (free edition from the manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; edited by Cesar Bonan; CC BY-SA; ISMN 979-0-802308-15-2)
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About this piece
Sigismund Neukomm, Joseph Haydn's favourite pupil, lived in Rio de Janeiro from 1816 to 1821 and wrote about 70 works there. He dated these six variations on a theme by Kozeluch 23 November 1817 and dedicated them to Princess Carolina-Leopoldina, the Austrian archduchess who had arrived in Rio that month to marry Prince Pedro. The piano leads most of the set, but the cello shares the D minor theme, takes the melody alone in the second variation with dotted figures and a trill, plucks the fourth, and ends the work with rocking sixteenth-note string crossings and a long low D. Musica Brasilis edited the score from the manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Technical overview
Andante in D minor and 2/4, with every variation in two repeated halves. The cello part stays in bass clef and first position, from the open C string up to the C above the staff, with an extension for the C-sharps. It mixes quarter and eighth notes with dotted rhythms and sixteenth-note runs, grace notes, trills, staccato notes, sf accents, a pizzicato variation, a three-note chord on A and a closing D-A double stop.
Technical focus
- C String Notes
- Chords
- Collaboration with Piano
- Dotted Rhythms
- Dynamics
- Extensions
- Grace Notes
- Pizzicato
- Staccato
- String Crossings
- Trills