Johannes Brahms — Handel Variations (Op. 24) — Notebook

A birthday gift for Clara Schumann, in Brahms's own hand. Then pages of your own.

The document

In September 1861, Brahms dated a manuscript of new piano variations and gave it a personal title: Variationen für eine liebe Freundin — variations for a dear friend. It was a birthday gift for Clara Schumann. He was twenty-eight; she turned forty-two that month. That first autograph, twenty pages of music in ink with pencil corrections, is kept today at the Library of Congress. This notebook reproduces it complete: every page, in order.

Inside the notebook

First, a short guide to the manuscript: the gift and the woman it was for; the premiere she gave in Hamburg on 7 December 1861; Handel's eight-bar Aria, the theme Brahms started from; a few ways into the variations, pair by pair; and the places where this early copy differs from the score that was later printed — including two variations whose order was reversed on the page, with changed numbers and arrows in the margin.

Then the twenty pages of the manuscript, reduced to fit the page, each opening a verso and the recto that follows it.

Then the pages are yours: 75 pages of staff paper, ten five-line staves to a page.

A4, spiral-bound, it lies flat. The manuscript is oblong, and so is the notebook: it opens the way the score does.

Johannes Brahms · Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24 · first autograph · September 1861 · Library of Congress, Music Division, Gertrude Clarke Whittall Foundation Collection, ML30.8b .B7 op. 24