Theme Varie sur le nom de Haydn (score & parts) - WW5 (PDF)

Thème Varié sur le nom de Haydn - PDF

Theme and Variations on the Name of Haydn

for woodwind quintet (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon
by Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) - French composer, conductor, music critic and singer

arranged by Trevor Cramer

This is the PDF download.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Reynaldo Hahn was best known for his songs – mélodies – of which he wrote more than 100. Hahn was born in Caracas but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he lived most of his life there. After the First World War, in which he served in the army, Hahn adapted to new musical and theatrical trends and enjoyed successes with his first opérette, Ciboulette (1923). During the Second World War Hahn, who was of Jewish descent, took refuge in Monaco, returning to Paris in 1945 where he was appointed director of the Opéra. He died in Paris in 1947, aged 72.

Hahn was a prolific composer. His vocal works include secular and sacred pieces, lyric scenes, cantatas, oratorios, operas, comic operas, and operettas. Orchestral works include concertos, ballets, tone poems, incidental music for plays and films. He wrote a range of chamber music and piano works. He sang as well as played his own songs, and made recordings as a soloist and accompanying other performers. After his death his music was neglected but from the late 20th century onward increasing interest has led to frequent performances of many of his works and recordings of all his songs and piano works, and much of his other music.

His father, Carlos Hahn, the eldest son of a Jewish family in Hamburg, emigrated to Venezuela in 1845 at the age of twenty-two, making a highly successful business career there. He converted to Roman Catholicism to marry Elena de Echenagucia; she was of Spanish descent on her father's side and Dutch-English on her mother's. When his friend and associate Antonio Guzmán Blanco became president of the country in 1876, Carlos became Blanco's financial adviser. The Hahns had eleven or twelve children, nine of whom lived to adulthood. Reynaldo, known as "Nano", was the youngest, twenty years younger than his eldest brother. He was brought up speaking fluent German, Spanish and had a British nanny.

When Blanco's first term of office came to an end in 1877, the Hahn family left Venezuela and settled in Paris, where they had relations and well-connected friends. It was France that, as a 21st-century writer put it, would "determine and define Hahn's musical identity in later life". Among the family's Parisian friends was Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon I; the young Hahn sang for her, and made his public debut at the age of six, at a musical soirée in her drawing room. He began composition lessons with an Italian teacher when he was eight.

In 1885, aged eleven, Hahn was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire's preparatory course. He went on to study piano with Émile Decombes (in the same class as Maurice Ravel and Alfred Cortot), harmony with Albert Lavignac and Théodore Dubois, and composition with Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet. The last became Hahn's lifelong friend and mentor. Through Massenet, Hahn met Camille Saint-Saëns, with whom he studied privately in addition to his Conservatoire lessons.

In the early 1890s Hahn worked on his first opera L'île du rêve, "a Polynesian idyll", written at Massenet's behest. During this period he met Marcel Proust for the first time. As far as is known, the 19-year-old Hahn's romantic attachments before then had been intimate but platonic relationships with famous Parisienne beauties. The two men quickly began an intense love affair, Proust's only real liaison. Their affair lasted for only two years, but it evolved into a lifelong close friendship.

In 1905 he composed one of his most popular works, the suite for chamber ensemble Le Bal de Béatrice d'Este; in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Patrick O'Connor observes that this work, "conceived merely as a divertissement", has remained one of the composer's best-known and most frequently played pieces.