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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
It was in 1942, at the age of thirty, that Igor Markevitch published in Milan the work which was to be his last: Variazioni e fuga su un tema di Haendel for piano. Modest in scale compared to the composer's more frequent deployment of choral and orchestral forces, this set of Variations is none the less one of his most robust works—and at the same time a profoundly lyrical one. Far from forecasting the end of a career, it marks on the contrary its high point, revealing a notable capacity for synthesis—synthesis both of his own style and of a pianistic tradition assimilated in an extremely personal manner.
1 A term which, in French literature, is applied to the last verse of a ballade, in which the author, addressing himself to the reader, sums up the idea of the poem.
1 Even if not characteristic of the fugue, the idea of reprise is no stranger to baroque instrumental music. More or less exact reprises are to be found in Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, the preludes from the English Suites, etc.
2 Markevitch could have written ‘organ’ in the margin of this passage, just as Prokofieff indicates ‘harp’ or ‘four bassoons’ in his piano pieces!
1 It is not a matter of polytonality but only of polyfunctionality: the ‘alien’ scale is only the dominant (subdominant, relative, etc.) of the basic key.
2 It is for this reason that the modes were not indicated in the example analysed above. Major and minor maintain all their expressive importance but, with Markevitch, they are equivalent from the harmonic point of view.