The theme-type

The title, ‘An Aria with diverse Variations’, already produces a puzzle: if the thirty movements are variations on this aria or theme, why is it never heard again or even hinted at in paraphrase or some decorated form until it is repeated, sans différence, at the end? (Repeated but not written out: the player is told Aria da capo è fine.)

Of course, it is the harmonies underlying the Aria that serve as the basis for the variations, thirty distinct essays exploring the language and genres of music as its composer understood them. But when, during the century or so between Frescobaldi's and Handel's published sets, the theme of some variations had been called ‘aria’ or ‘air’ by composers, both its melody and harmony had been glimpsed from time to time. This was also the case with Bach's various other variation-works: not only in the early Aria variata and chorale partitas – where part of the point was to hear the hymn-tune, to be reminded of it, how ever subliminally – but so it is too in the mature Musical Offering and the Canonic Variations, where the themes continue to be ‘glimpsed’.

Perhaps some players or listeners fancy that in the course of the thirty movements they do hear the original melody of the Aria now and then, but I for one do not and can only assume that one is not meant to: we have here variations or varied treatments not of a melody but of a series of chords, which are explored in a series of discrete genres and according to a uniquely ingenious plan.