Variations on a popular melody
Beethoven had written the Variations op. 121a for Piano, Violin and Violoncello as early as 1801/02. However fifteen years later as he himself wrote he found them good enough to be brought out again and offered to the Leipzig publisher Härtel for publication. On 19 July 1816 he wrote to Gottfried Christoph Härtel in Leipzig, "Variations with an introduction and coda for Piano, violin and violoncello upon a well-known theme by Müller. They are one of my earlier compositions but do not belong to the bad ones." The clean autograph score shown here is probably a second copy he made during negotiations with the publisher, as both the paper and the neatness of the handwriting enable us to place the date around 1816.
The model for the theme was a well-known popular melody from the Singspiel "Die Schwestern von Prag" ("The sisters from Prague") by Joachim Perinet and Wenzel Müller, which was first performed on 11 March 1794. The work is a turbulent comedy of mistaken identities, in which - as is so often the case the action centres around marriage and love. The text for Müller's Lied "Ich bin der Schneider Wetz und Wetz" (I am the tailor, whet and whet) is suggestive and the Lied has a catchy melody two components which added to its popularity (the Singspiel was performed 130 times in the Marienelli Theatre in Vienna's Leopoldstadt during Beethoven's lifetime). Müller had already set the three verse couplet up as a kind of variation. Although the verses of the Lied were always the same for the singer, the orchestral accompaniment changed from verse to verse. The character of the melody and the style of the accompaniment really call for a set of variations, which Beethoven wrote for piano, violin and cello. They were written "with such spirit and bold imagination, as only a master can write variations" as a critic wrote of op. 121a in Vienna's Allgemeiner Musikalischer Anzeiger in 1830. (J.R.)
