It’s longer and perhaps more imposing and requires strong left hands to execute its numerous massive double-stops and chords as well as an agile right one to survey its widely varied bowings. 7 as its basis), has not received such frequent attention. The Sarabande with Variations, based, like the Passacaglia, on a theme by George Frideric Handel (the Passacaglia takes the Passacaille from Handel’s Keyboard Suite No. Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman later took it up, and these violinistic celebrities haveRead more helped keep the composer’s name before audiences. Jascha Heifetz played Johann Halvorsen’s Passacaglia with William Primrose. Natalia Lomeiko (vn) Yuri Zhislin (va, 1 vn).Some late nineteenth-century composers took an interest in the form, notably Brahms in the finale of the Variations on a Theme of Haydn and in the last movement of the Fourth Symphony. Pieces of this general type were extremely common in the seventeenth century (the Pachelbel Canon is a familiar example) but had become a bit old-fashioned by 1720. The melody, the rhythmic figuration, and the texture could contrast sharply from one variation to the next.
A passacaglia was a type of variation movement in which the theme was not a tune but a bass line or a chord progression-in this case, a set of eight chords filling four measures.
The original piece by Handel is the last movement of the seventh of his harpsichord suites, HWV 432. This Passacaglia represents a late Romantic adaptation of Baroque style similar to that of Grieg’s own Holberg Suite. As the eminent Norwegian violinist and composer Johan Halvorsen married a niece of Edvard Grieg, it is not surprising that his musical style resembles that of his uncle by marriage.
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