Rhapsodic Variations for Violin and Orchestra

The versatile musician, composer, violist, violinist, chamber musician, music educator, and organizer Miroslav Miletić (Sisak, August 22, 1925 – Zagreb, January 3, 2018) acquired his music education in Zagreb, Prague, and later in Salzburg, Utrecht, and Hilversum. Miletić’s musical works, created over a span of almost 70 years, are a mirror of the events in the history of music just after World War II right up to the strivings of the music of the 2020s. In this vast period, which in Croatian music were marked by the aesthetic of the neo-national course, flashes of neo-folk music, avant-garde trends, the appearance of electronic music, experimentation and then by the return to tradition and the pluralism of the post-modern, Miletić’s music went through transformations in accordance with the composer’s openness to the new, and to current endeavours equipoised with the spirit of the time. However, equally formative for his musical work was the quest for an individual and personal expression and style. Over the course of time he first of all incorporated many elements which in the long path of development he purged from his musical idiom, identifying them as foreign to his artistic being and musical worldview. In all this, the traditional was a constant, a lasting source of musical ideas and a safe haven to which would return after occasional excursions into the wide expanses of the musically new and unknown. In terms of these characteristics Miroslav Miletić was one of the Croatian composers who most consistently and most persistently sought for an authentic musical language, uncompromisingly following his own creative instinct and the profound inner drive of the genuine artist. Miroslav Miletić composed the Rhapsodic Variations for violin and piano and a version of it for violin and orchestra in 1967, dedicating it to his violin teacher, professor of the Music Academy in Zagreb, Ivan Pinkava. The composer self- published the violin and piano version in 1963 via the publishing department of the then Federation of Yugoslav Composers. The version of the work for violin and orchestra is on this occasion being published for the first time. It is not known when the composition was first performed, but it can be assumed that on some occasion it was played by the composer himself. Miletić uses a very distinctive and harsh harmonic idiom that is actually either atonal or can be said to be on the very edge of tonality. The whole work in its sound seems distinctive and modern, but the archaic melodic line of folk origin gives the work a link with tradition, rooting it. At the same time this ensures it a recognisable factor that enables the listener to feel that the work is somehow familiar. Miletić’s Rhapsodic Variations, then, builds on the same principles of combining folk elements and the language of contemporary music that are used by for example Béla Bartók. In the violin and orchestra version of Rhapsodic Variations, unlike the monochrome (because of the nature of the sound of the piano) version for piano and violin, the lavishness of the tonal colours comes to the fore. In the orchestration, Miletić pays particular attention to the guitar and to some rather seldom used percussion instruments, which gives the work an additional touch of originality and authenticity. The publication of Miletić’s Rhapsodic Variations, with its attractive and original musical idiom and successful blend of tradition and contemporaneity, will make the work available to a wide circle of musicians and thus facilitate its more frequent performance. Like Miletić’s brilliant Dance for violin solo, this composition too has the potential and the artistic value to make it a permanent work in the repertoires of outstanding violinists and orchestras, in Croatian and worldwide.