Hallelujah Variations | Anderson & Roe Piano Duo

A cult classic originally released in 1984, Leonard Cohen’s most well-known song—covered by numerous artists, including legends like Bob Dylan, Bono, and Jeff Buckley (whose sublime version may be our personal favorite)—is a meditation on the elusive nature of love and the search for atonement. The lyrics contain emotional multitudes in their complexity, and the meaning of “hallelujah” itself seems to shift throughout the song, alternating between despair, yearning, ecstasy, and praise; it emerges as a call that is not solely religious, but profoundly human. As Cohen himself said: “This world is full of conflicts... of things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’ ...That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.” In creating our set of variations, we were influenced by the late works of Beethoven and Schubert, who both were masters at un