Diabelli Variations in C Major

Beethoven must have misread the memo when in 1819 the music publisher Anton Diabelli sent his waltz theme to every composer in Austria he considered important, with the request that they each compose a single variation. The immediate results amounted to a “patriotic anthology”, with submissions from the likes of Schubert, Hummel, Moscheles, Archduke Rudolph and even Liszt, who was aged 11 at the time of his contribution. Beethoven initially seems not to have been impressed by his friend’s theme, dismissing it as “a cobbler’s patch” that was not worth spending time on. Something about it, though, must have impressed him, for in fact he worked on the theme for some years and in 1823 the Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli—his last large-scale piano work—was published. This is a work rarely matched even by Beethoven in its overarching ambition and near hour-long scale, making it a 19th-century counterpart to Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741). Beethoven not only varies the tune (such as it is) but also mines the theme as much for its musical characteristics—intervals, ornaments, repeated notes—as for its very personality, elevating its banality to transcendence through his peerless technical skill and compositional imagination, without forgetting to add a rich strain of humour and parody along the way. Tributes are paid, too: explicitly to Mozart in “Variation 22”, with its quotation of the opening number from Don Giovanni, to Cramer’s finger exercises in “Variation 23” and to Bach in the Fughetta of “Variation 24”.