Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) was a Dutch composer, organist, and pedagogue whose work straddled the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras. He was among the first major keyboard composers of Europe, and his work as a teacher helped establish the north German organ tradition.

Sweelinck represents the highest development of the Dutch keyboard school, and indeed represented a pinnacle in keyboard contrapuntal complexity and refinement before J.S. Bach. However, he was a skilled composer for voices as well, and composed more than 250 vocal works (chansons, madrigals, motets and Psalms).

Some of Sweelinck's innovations were of profound musical importance, including the fugue—he was the first to write an organ fugue which began simply, with one subject, successively adding texture and complexity until a final climax and resolution, an idea which was perfected at the end of the Baroque era by Bach. It is also generally thought that many of Sweelinck's keyboard works were intended as studies for his pupils. He was also the first to use the pedal as a real fugal part. Stylistically Sweelinck's music also brings together the richness, complexity and spatial sense of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and the ornamentation and intimate forms of the English keyboard composers. In some of his works Sweelinck appears as a composer of the baroque style, with the exception of his chansons which mostly resemble the French Renaissance tradition. In formal development, especially in the use of countersubject, stretto, and organ point (pedal point), his music looks ahead to Bach (who was quite possibly familiar with Sweelinck’s music).

Sweelinck was a master improviser, and acquired the informal title of the "Orpheus of Amsterdam". More than 70 of his keyboard works have survived, and many of them may be similar to the improvisations that residents of Amsterdam around 1600 were likely to have heard. In the course of his life, Sweelinck was involved with the musical liturgies of three distinctly different traditions: Catholic, the Calvinist, and Lutheran—all of which are reflected in his work. Even his vocal music, which is more conservative than his keyboard writing, shows a striking rhythmic complexity and an unusual richness of contrapuntal devices

"Ballo del Granduca" (The Grand Duke's Ball), SwWV 319, is a composition for solo keyboard instrument attributed to Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. The composition is based on the theme of a dance of 1589 entitled "O che nuova miracolo", an intermedio from the comedy Intermedi della Pellegrina, composed by Emilio de' Cavalieri on the occasion of the wedding of Ferdinando I de' Medici to Christina of Lorraine. The theme of the composition, later known as "Aria di Fiorenza" or "Ballo del Granduca", quickly gained renown in Europe and became the basis for at least 128 other songs, contemporary and later.

Inspired by this theme, several composers produced variations, including Adriano Banchieri, Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger, and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. It is not clear, however, whether the variations on "Ballo del Granduca" attributed to Sweelinck are completely his work.

Because some of his students, such as Samuel Scheidt, added variations to his different compositions (Scheidt and Sweelinck, in Pavana Hispanica, combined a series of alternating variations), some scholars hypothesize that Sweelinck wrote parts of Ballo del Granduca, but Scheidt also contributed.

The style of the composition is influenced by the two major currents of the period: Italian polyphony and the technique of English virginalists. From the Italian style Sweelinck assimilated the beauty of counterpoint, while from the virginalists he developed the virtuosity of passages, arpeggios, and fioriture (ornamentation). The dance includes a theme (although the score labels it 1e Variatie) and four variations (or five, if we count the theme as a first variation).

The theme of the composition, which forms the basis for the variations, offers the improviser considerable of freedom. It consists of a series of five short musical phrases lasting four beats each, basically in chords, each one concluded by a cadence. The cadences are in G major (the tonic of the piece), C major, A minor, G major, and G major.

The first variation shows several passages for the right hand with eighth notes and sixteenth notes, while the left hand performs an accompaniment in chords with two and three voices. In the second variation the hands are reversed: the right accompanies and the left plays the melody. The third variation contains most of the semicircular passages typical of the Sweelinck style. The piece ends with the fourth variation, the most challenging, where the right hand constantly performs third and sixth chords.

Although originally composed for Keyboard, I created this Interpretation of the "Ballo del Granduca" (The Grand Duke's Ball -- SwWV 319) for String Quartet (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).