Variations in history: performance practice

The Musical Times, being somewhat parti-pris, acclaimed Variations after the first performance, perhaps operating a double standard: it dismissed Rimsky-Korsakov's suite Snégourotchka (sic) as ‘an exercise in orchestration … but as music… beneath contempt’, while in ‘Dorabella’ ‘Berlioz himself need not have been ashamed of owning to this masterpiece of exquisitely refined scoring.’ Jaeger himself, though he complained that the finale was too short, continued: ‘Here is an English musician who has something to say and knows how to say it in his own individual and beautiful way … Effortless originality [is] combined with thorough savoir faire, and most important of all, beauty of theme…’

These sentiments were entirely in line with the views of other critics, and Novello's selected the most favourable for a series of column-length advertisements in The Musical Times. Several epithets appear more than once, among them ‘clever’, ‘ingenious’ (also ‘well-wrought’), and ‘humorous’; aspects singled out more than once for praise are the contrasts within the set and the orchestration.