VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF GINO PALUMBO
At times extremes meet; and in fact the distance between heaven and hell can be smaller than you could expect. How much greater is the hope that has moved us, so much greater can be the following disenchantment.
The “Sad Waltz” composed by my friend Gino Palumbo expresses well the nostalgia that follows a loving disappointment. A feeling that, even though soaked with pain for something that there’s no longer (or that whe don’t any more believe possible) is, in a certain way, also sweet and charming, in the measure in which it is full of the memory of something beautiful that is (has been) able to arouse in us a betrayed (not realized), but not disowned, hope. It would have been beautiful if the dream had come true.
It is just the opposite of nihilism, that is a radical negation of hope, the desperation of who doesn’t succeed even in feeling nostalgia, but looks with violence to free himself from the desire of happiness that embodied itself in the one for the beloved person. So not only the answer, but even the question is ignored.
Subsequently to an amorous disappointment that, together with different other factors, had for me, at the time, a disruptive effect, bringing me to doubt of the values (in first place, the religious ones) on which I had until founded my existence, I felt the need of “destroying” the Sad Waltz’s theme and the hope that it contains, as if I had to disclose the “deception” of the piece: the promise, however not realized, of the happiness.
Also the theme show the effects, certain only ideologically and not as sound effect, of this formulation: transcribed for two pianos, it is enriched from a second voice and harmony is slightly modified. Even the biting are in advance or late in comparison to their original position. In the end (absent in Gino’s composition) the rhythm 3/4 becomes in fact 5/8, introducing to the first variation. Also the final chord 
, deprived of the third, prepares the following chords of fourths . In a sense even the theme is already almost a variation, as if us were in front of variations on a theme... that there isn’t!
In the first variation (the hardest, where you can perceive the total destruction of whatever nostalgic feeling) the theme, harmonized with fourths, is overlapped to an incisive and rhythmically unpredictable melody, almost always in 3/4, based on a scale of 6 notes (those of natural B minor , with the exception of E). The accompaniment in 5/8 is formed from based on chords of fourths with an extraneous note arpeggios: the whole thing in a different tonality in comparison to the melodies, almost to resound the sound a bit ridiculous of an old out of tune pianola with a roll by now consumed. To all this, at times, in the most deep region of the piano, the left hand of the first piano overlap playing almost exclusively as a percussion instrument. As it happens when a scratched disk made the turntable’s needle (or, if you prefer, the laser for reading a CD) jump, some fragment of the melody is repeated or jumped; gradually also the accompaniment in 5/8 is misfiring. Toward the end the melody turns itself into a version of the theme that remind us of Hindemith; then, one at a time, all the parts keep silent, almost as if the piece would “evaporate”.
The second variation is based on four repetitions of a version of the theme restricted to the basic points, having preserved only the most important notes. Suddenly every hardness entirely disappears, even if the character, a bit as piano-bar, is at times away from the nobility of the original one. Nevertheless very soon the dissonances take back the upper hand, even if with less violence, with various calls to the preceding variation.
On the following variations I am still working.
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(The score is available in .MUS for Finale 2003 or .pdf for Acrobat Reader format)
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