Mozart - 6 Variations on "Hélas, j'ai perdu mon amant", K.360/374b [Szeryng/Haebler]

Описание: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was one of the most influential, popular and prolific composers of the classical period. A child prodigy, from an early age he began composing over 600 works, including some of the most famous pieces of symphonic, chamber, operatic, and choral music.

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6 Variations in G minor on "Hélas, j'ai perdu mon amant", K.360/374b (1781)
Dedicated to Maria Caroline Thiennes de Rumbeke.

Theme: (0:00)
Var. I (1:35)
Var. II (3:06)
Var. III (4:34)
Var. IV (6:03)
Var. V (7:34)
Var. VI (9:14)

Henryk Szeryng, violin and Ingrid Haebler, piano

In the same letter of July 1781 in which Mozart told his sister he was about to publish a group of sonatas for piano and violin, he also mentioned that he had completed three sets of variations. We can’t be sure about their identity, but the most likely candidates all have a French source: the variations for solo piano on a theme from Grétry’s opera Les mariages samnites (K352), and two sets for piano and violin on melodies from collections put together by the castrato and composer Égide-Joseph Albanèse: La bergère Célimène (K359), and Auprès [or Au bord] d’une source (K360). The Variations in G minor, K360, remain popularly known as ‘Hélas, j’ai perdu mon amant’—an invented label, but one that perhaps fits the music’s melancholy mood rather better than the actual title of Albanèse’s air. The only change Mozart made to the original melody was to transpose it from E minor into a more pathetic G minor. In the theme and first variation the violin acts as accompanist, but it emerges into the foreground in the strikingly chromatic second variation, whose lilting rhythm stresses the melody’s siciliano-like character with gentle pathos. Following the more forceful next variation, variation 4 has groups of rippling semiquaver triplets alternating between the two instruments, while the penultimate variation sees the melody transformed into the major. At the end of the last variation, with its fleeting arpeggios, the music seems to disappear into a hole at the bottom of the keyboard.
from notes by Misha Donat © 2017