JAVS Fall 1997

occasionally borrow contours of the Theme in the placement of their top notes. The focus has shifted to the viola part, which plays the gadfly above the slow, solemn piano chords with quick repeated notes that start very softly and gradually become louder, higher, and faster until the Coda. The viola passage is built upon several appearances of motives and phrases from the Theme (Figure 12). Many of these are incomplete; most involve repetition; several are antici pated by their first few notes. Britten's simple but ingenious device of raising the last note of the first .phrase of the Theme an octave pushes the music higher and higher in pitch (Dow land's original cadence ends well below the highest point of the phrase). As in other variations, full use is made of the possibilities of chromatic alteration, but the initial pitches chosen for phrases are strikingly conservative: most begin on Cs, Fs, or Gs. The viola finally cadences on a triumphant C. The return of the Theme-which, it will be recalled, is but the first strain of Dowland's song-goes through a series of tonal "sideslips," each landing in a new key, often a third below the expected one. For example, the triumph of arrival at Cat the end of Variation 10 is already tempered in the next measure by reinterpretation of that note as the third scale degree of A minor and thus as the second note, not the first, of the first phrase of the Theme. The second phrase is repeated several times, descending through several keys from F# minor to A~ major. The piano occasionally takes flight with a repeated-note figure from the last measure of Variation 10-its rendering of that variation's viola part. This figure consists of a slightly ornamented motive x reiterated through the circle of fifths, perhaps meant to remind us of the fifths of the opening of the Introduction. When it alights, however, it is always to harmonies over a prominent C pedal, suggesting that the tonal sideslips of the melody are really sleight of hand: Cis the real focus here as nearly everywhere in Lachrymae. Toward the end the C pedal of the harmony finally moves to join the melody and cadence on Ak