Servais - Fantaisie et Variations sur des motifs de l'Opéra la Fille du Régiment de Donizetti, Op. 16 (Urtext Edition, Piano Version)

François Servais is best remembered today for his Six Caprices, Op. 11, but much of his output consists of brilliant concert fantasies based on opera themes and popular melodies. His Fantaisie et Variations sur des motifs de l’opéra La Fille du Régiment de Donizetti, Op. 16, was among his better-known works, especially after his death. Its influence can be traced in the next generation of Romantic-era cello writing, including works by Karl Davydov, David Popper, Victor Herbert, and Antonín Dvořák.

The fantasy is based on themes from Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, especially “Chacun le sait, chacun le dit.” The work includes an introduction, recitative, theme and four variations, Romance, and Finale, with each variation centered on a particular virtuoso technique: long shifts and string crossings, long bows and syncopated bowing, artificial harmonics, and octaves. Popper’s Etude, Op. 73, No. 38, draws on figuration found in this fantasy, while a passage from the Finale was later famously echoed in the first movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, Op. 104.

A major example of Servais’s opera-fantasy style, this work combines Donizetti’s melodic brilliance with the full range of nineteenth-century cello virtuosity.

ASTA Level: 6