The piece
The Folia is an old dance tune from the Iberian Peninsula: a slow bass, always the same, over which the musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invent variation after variation. In 1705 the young Vivaldi published in Venice his very first collection, twelve sonatas for two violins and bass; the last one is a Folia, a theme followed by nineteen variations. This easy version, written for Noctave after an Amsterdam edition from the 1710s, keeps its whole theme: sixteen bars in D minor.
The right hand plays the first violin's tune, the left hand the bass, note for note, and both hands follow the same rhythm: a quarter note, a dotted quarter, an eighth. Lean a little on the dotted quarter, the second beat, as in a sarabande, and keep the eighth light. In bar 9 the tune starts again softly, as the edition asks, up to the final cadence.
