Duration: 17 minutes

Description: Clara Schumann (1819–1896), still known professionally as Clara Wieck, completed Variations de Concert, Op. 8 in 1837, during the years in which the teenage pianist was establishing herself as one of Europe’s outstanding virtuosos. Bearing the fuller title Variations de Concert sur la Cavatine du Pirate de Bellini, the work takes its theme from Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Il pirata (1827), specifically the cavatina associated with Imogene in Act I, and reflects the nineteenth-century fashion for brilliant piano fantasies and variations based upon familiar operatic melodies; Clara herself had heard Il pirata during her first visit to Paris in 1832. Dedicated to the celebrated pianist and composer Adolf von Henselt, the composition surrounds Bellini’s melody with an introduction and a succession of increasingly elaborate variations, combining bravura passagework and technical display with the lyrical and expressive qualities that would become hallmarks of Schumann’s mature music. The original version was published by Tobias Haslinger in Vienna in 1837, and Schumann subsequently revised and expanded the work for a Paris edition issued by Maurice Schlesinger in 1839. As one of the virtuoso compositions Clara used during the period of her rapidly expanding concert career, it belongs directly to the repertoire through which she developed her international reputation. Today, Variations de Concert, Op. 8 is performed less frequently than Schumann’s Three Romances, Op. 22, or Piano Concerto, Op. 7, but has enjoyed renewed attention as performers and scholars have reassessed her achievements as a composer, and it remains a formidable and revealing example of early Romantic virtuoso piano writing by one of the nineteenth century’s most important pianist-composers. Reprint edition.

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