Variations sur une valse de Johann Strauss for piano, Op. 23 (1935)
Dedication: To my friend Edward Clark
Draft manuscript: University of Warsaw Library. Call number: Mus. VIII manuscript 6
Editorial manuscript: University of Warsaw Library. Call number: Mus. VIII manuscript 5
Publication: Józef Koffler, Variations sur une valse de Johann Strauss. Op. 23. Piano solo. Universal Edition A. G., Vienna. Copyright 1936. No. 10796. 16 pages
Premiere: No data available
First press mention of performance: Lwów, January 1939, Fryderyk Portnoj – piano (Dziennik Polski 1939, no. 25)
Soon after publication, they received a devastating review from Stefan Kisielewski, who criticised them for ‘inept piano texture’, a banal theme, ‘complete lack of invention and form-building ingenuity’, as well as chaotic use of harmony (S. Kisielewski, ‘Józef Koffler. Variations sur une valse de Johann Strauss op. 23. Piano solo’, Muzyka Polska 6 (1936)). The work is based on the theme of Johann Strauss’s Kaiser-Walzer [Imperial Waltz], Op. 437, which is initially presented in its original harmonisation, and later – transformed atonally in a manner described by Jerzy Freiheiter (‘Józef Koffler’, Muzyka 7–12 (1936), 86) as the formation of harmonies ‘out of notes absent from the [original] tonal tune, those that must be added to form a twelve-note row’.
The final result, even from a contemporary perspective, appears so inconsistent that Maciej Gołąb considers this composition a less successful work and simultaneously questions the seriality of Koffler's twelve-tone technique. Additionally, the composer himself, in response to 'Kisiel', practically ‘put the cart before the horse’ by claiming that
not all of my works are composed in the twelve-note technique, and the said variations are among those [that are not], because they were a special commission
(Echo 6 (1937), 8).
Concerning the said commission, we have no information in sources, though the fact of the work’s dedication to Edward Clark, one of his best friends in musical circles, and its immediate publication by Vienna’s Universal Edition, may provide a clue.
In a letter to Slavko Osterc (without date), however, Koffler quotes a different reason for writing the Variations:
As a pastime, I took up a Johann Strauss waltz (Emperor Waltz), and I have already [composed] eighteen (twelve-note) variations on the first sixteen bars of that waltz!
Certainly, this work deserves particular attention—as a distinctive intellectual provocation or, indeed, an artistic subterfuge akin to a trompe l'œil.