Although the use of serial procedures sets Berio's Cinque Variazioni (1952 - 1953) apart from his later works, its general trajectory seems to plant the seed of all Berio's future works for solo piano. Indeed, while Berio's music has undergone extraordinarily wide shifts in terms of technique and style, certain other qualities have revealed themselves to be remarkably consistent. In particular, Berio seems to have found in the Variazioni a kind of pianism, a basic physiological blueprint for how to play the instrument, which one continues to hear in his Sequenza IV, Rounds, and eventually in the moto perpetuo playing of his famous piano and ensemble work Points on the Curve to Find...

The strength of this pianism is to some degree rooted in its musical intractability, its resistance to description. Nevertheless, certain qualities stick out: among them, Berio's penchant for perpetually reorganizing a limited nexus of pitches seemed to find its ideal site on the piano keyboard; with its denuded presentation of 88 buttons and endless responsiveness to different degrees of phrasing, attack, and timbre, it became a kind of mobile sculpture on which Berio could play out his inexhaustible elaborations. If the Cinque Variazioni were still tied to less instinctive techniques of organization, they balance their stricture by testifying to Berio's own performative instincts, almost as a primary document: Berio himself gave their premiere performance and has played the work in concert many times since.

The work is also a document of one of Berio's many early "exorcisms" as he called them; this particular score was part of Berio's four-piece working through the influence of his teacher Luigi Dallapiccola. The piece is dedicated to Dallapiccola, who Berio saw as "a point of reference...not just musical, but also spiritual, moral, and cultural..."; the musical influence was, however, invaluable. Dallapiccola led the way for the Italian reception of serialism and instilled those techniques with an intense Italian lyricism that Berio, among others, found vital. The depth of Berio's respect seems to bear itself out in the structure of his variations: the three-note "theme" on which they comment and embellish forms the backbone to what was then regarded as Dallapiccola's masterwork, the opera Il prigioniero. The fact that these variations work backwards, revealing the original theme only in their coda, combines with Berio's own ambivalence about influences to suggest quite an interesting bottled message in the piece: what could read as the score's "release" of the Prisoner theme from its captivity within Berio's ornate labyrinth could go the other too—Dallapiccola's theme still casting its shadow on Berio's score even after the younger composer's virtuosic struggle to purge the traces of another composer from his own developing language. The fact that Berio extensively revised the Variazioni in 1966 (significantly masking the coda presentation of the Prisoner theme) does give this otherwise whimsical speculation some credence.

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