Folia, La

In music, term used for a specific melody found in popular dances and songs of the baroque period. First mentioned by Francisco de Salinas in 1577, the melody was first used as the basis for variations in 1604 and later variations have been by Arcangelo Corelli, Henrico Albicastro, and Marin Marais (c. 1700), Alessandro Scarlatti, and C P E Bach (1778). Liszt used the theme in his Rhapsodie Espagnole, Rakhmaninov in his Variations on a theme of Corelli (dedicated to Fritz Kreisler, first performed in Montréal, Canada, on 12 October 1931), and Hans Werner Henze in Aria de la folia española (1977).