 Even with this division, the entire work was actually a set of variations on a single melody—a folk hymn sung to Liszt by a gondolier in Venice in the late 1830s.Among the most significant revisions Liszt made was the addition of a middle section in the vein of a minuet.The theme of the minuet was, again, a variant of the gondolier's folk hymn, thus becoming another example of thematic transformation.