The art of variation has close ties with the art of improvisation. Audiences revere musicians who can extemporize on a given theme, presenting it with...

The art of variation has close ties with the art of improvisation. Audiences revere musicians who can extemporize on a given theme, presenting it with refinement and elaborately increasing its effect. That kind of spontaneous music-making boomed in Mozart and Beethoven’s day: competitions pitting one star pianist against another were all the rage. Such improvisations gave rise to sets of variations which introduced the theme at the beginning and declined it according to skill. Gunilla Süssmann has selected three sets of variations featuring themes with widely different origins and treated in thoroughly different ways.