The goddess Fortuna reigned over late medieval minds, her capricious nature as real to them as any Las Vegas gambler's "Lady Luck." Fortuna could spin her great Wheel, and the lives and fortunes of men and women would steadily climb, ascend to the very heights, and just as inexorably drop any human beings back into the abyss. Fortuna was celebrated in paintings, in mosaics, and in songs, and her influence sought by augurs and prayers. It should come as no surprise, then, to find a song about Fortuna among the sets of keyboard variations surviving from the hand of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Even a man secure for decades in his job of providing music to the educated citizens of Amsterdam might fear the vicissitudes of Fortuna (as might his audience).

Perhaps the image of Fortuna's Wheel caused Sweelinck specifically to experiment in these variations with frequent imitation between voices: imitation that lends an audible circularity to some melodies and literally places the same motives on higher or lower planes at different times! The composer also uses chromatic shifts of notes relatively frequently. The first variation, as is his common practice, follows a relatively simple and often homophonic manner, though in this case he quite frequently migrates echoes of motivic fragments from the melody voice into the lower voices. In the second variation, the vagaries of melodic fortune are even more democratic, as fragments no longer only travel from the top down; lower voices sometimes initiate small melodic fragments that cast about among all voices for a few measures. The metaphor breaks down in the third variation, though only partially—the virtuosic running passages that decorate all voices here do shift registers and echo one another, but not exclusively. The chromatic cross-relations remain, however, as an audible echo of shifting fortunes.

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