Beethoven

Beethoven Diabelli Variations (Download)

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BEETHOVEN and the world of VARIATIONS followed by a Glenn Gould introduction

Variation was one of his favourite ways of thinking in music, and not just because it showed off his imagination or technical skill. Writing variations was a way to ask a simple question again and again: ‘how much can one idea contain?’ Throughout his career, from teenage piano compositions to the late masterpieces, Beethoven returned to variation form as a musical laboratory where he could test structure, character, emotion, and even philosophy.

At its most basic, a set of variations starts with something familiar — a theme that feels stable, balanced, and complete. In the Classical tradition inherited from Haydn and Mozart, variations often decorated that theme: adding more rapid passages, changing rhythms, or shifting the mood while keeping the underlying shape intact. Beethoven learned this style thoroughly, and in his early works you can hear him mastering its rules. But very quickly, he began to push against them.

What makes Beethoven’s use of variation so distinctive is that he rarely treats the theme as something fixed. Instead of polishing it from different angles, he pulls it apart. He might focus on a bass line rather than the melody, isolate a rhythm, exaggerate a harmony, or stretch a tiny fragment until it becomes the whole point of a variation. Sometimes the theme almost disappears, only recognisable by its skeleton — a chord progression, a harmonic tension, or a rhythmic pulse. Listening to Beethoven’s variations can feel less like watching someone change costumes and more like observing a thinker wrestle with an idea.

Emotionally, Beethoven’s variations cover a huge range. Within a single set, you might hear humour, sarcasm, elegance, tenderness, brute force, and sudden stillness. One variation may sound like a joke, the next like a confession, and this emotional contrast is not accidental; it is how creates drama. These variations often feel like characters in a story rather than polite musical exercises. Over the course of a set, he often builds tension, explores extremes, binding everything together in a final, decisive statement.

Another striking feature is scale. Beethoven expands variation form so it can carry the weight of something almost symphonic. His variations don’t just add up; they ‘progress’. There’s often a sense of direction — a feeling that the music is moving toward a goal, even though it keeps stopping to explore side paths. By the time the final variation or coda arrives, it often feels earned, as if the theme has gone through an experience and becomes transfigured.

This approach reaches its peak in works like the Eroica Variations, the Diabelli Variations, and the late piano sonatas, where variation becomes less a form and more a philosophy. In these pieces, Beethoven seems fascinated by transformation itself: how something simple can survive stress, contradiction, and expansion without losing its identity. The theme becomes a constant presence, even when it’s barely audible. 

The fugue is not a return to the past but a means of intensification. By placing it near the end of a variation cycle, he suggests that true transformation isn’t just surface change; it requires structure, memory, and coherence. It gathers the scattered ideas of the variations and forces them to coexist. In his music, variations followed by a fugue feel almost philosophical; freedom leads to order; exploration leads to understanding. The music doesn’t just change — it proves that change can be meaningful, unified, and enduring.

And these variations invite an active kind of listening. We are not just waiting for the melody to return; we are tracking relationships, noticing what stays the same and what changes. Over time, we start to hear connections that weren’t obvious at first, and the piece feels richer with each mutation.

In short, Beethoven doesn’t use variations for decoration or display. They are a way to think out loud in music — to explore, challenge, and ultimately affirm the power of a single idea pushed to its limits. 

Kandinsky Composition VIII 1923

Guggenheim Museum NY

Glenn Gould : introduction to one of his CBS televised performances of Op 35

While I cannot recommend his interpretations of Beethoven in general, one has to admire his commitment and incredible mastery of the instrument. Possibly because of CBS time constraints, this particular performance omitted a number of second repeats and some of the faster tempi were indeed excessive. However, much of what he played, said and wrote at this period is perceptive and significant.

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From an unlikely theme, Beethoven was to build one of the greatest sets of symphonic variations. By the time he got around to writing the Eroica, Beethoven had already examined the possibilities of that theme on three previous occasions. It began as the baseline of a simple 16 bar Contredanse for orchestra. Two years later, with its accompanying melody, it became part of a somewhat larger structure, the finale of Beethoven’s ballet, the creatures of Prometheus. But Beethoven was far from satisfied with that. And in 1802, I think he laid out a full scale work for piano based upon this theme, the 15 variations in fugue opus 35.

And it’s a work which I find fascinating, especially when I regard it as a try out for one of Beethoven’s truly great symphonies. Nothing indicates more clearly, I think, Beethoven’s unique musical disposition and his choice of thematic material, or more specifically, the use to which he puts it. Beethoven treats his thematic units just as an architect and regards a blueprint. Within those sketches is contained an emotional condensation of the whole. Beethoven sketched voluminously, particularly in his middle years, and it’s in these sketches that we can watch him unravel the dramatic possibilities of his theme. Beethoven had an incredible faculty for recognising in themes which in themselves were sometimes embarrassingly insignificant, a capacity for development, for expansion. He was quite able to visualise that a theme which all by itself appeared awkward or shabby or perhaps even a little naive could given certain circumstances, certain opportunities in relation to the work as a whole produce an effect of overwhelming power or excitement.

You all know that famous motif from the fifth symphony. Yet what impact would it have were it not for its continuation? It actually begs continuation, but Beethoven is far from finished with it, and it propels itself onward to this dynamic rhythmic and motivic augmentation. Yet for all its arresting quality, its great vitality, for all that it is perhaps the most famous insignia in music, how many of you would consider it whistling material? Very few, I should think. And the reason, of course, is that in Beethoven, the pleasures of the immediate moment must always be sacrificed for the total effect. 

By contrast, Mozart is often more easygoing about the development of his themes. Frequently, they’re more complete in themselves. They’re better whistling material. They can more easily stand detached from the work as a whole. And Mozart is much less concerned with milking them of all their possibilities in the way that Beethoven does. It’s this really that makes the difference between Mozart who always seems a relaxed and ingratiating fellow while Beethoven on the other hand always seems under great pressure to meet his destiny around the next modulation.

In a sense therefore Beethoven in no matter what form he happens to be writing is engaged in elaborating his material so that it appears to be growing constantly. He is in a sense always writing variations and when he comes to write his major sets of piano variations and I do mean the major ones because Beethoven was not above turning out on demand drawing room trivia on rather popular operatic themes of the day. 

When he comes to write his major variations he invariably chooses themes which are in themselves musical nonentities. Beethoven’s greatest set of variations is written on a completely absurd tune by an amateur named Diabelli. Op 35 does of course contain within itself the seeds of a more identifiable melodic property, the Prometheus melody. But though this theme appears from time to time, Beethoven makes it clear that it’s really the bass theme which he has set out to exploit. And it is this ungainly motive which supplies the dramatic revelations of the Eroica variations. Now you may well ask, how can this this undecorated baseline be dramatic? What’s exciting about the constant alternation of the principal notes of the scale? And surely you don’t call this this accentuation of one note B flat drama. 

Well, the answer to that is contained in the question. For it’s that very avoidance of elaboration, that unwillingness to commit itself in advance that makes this such a useful theme. Consider by comparison the wonderful theme of Mendelssohn’s variations. It’s gorgeous, but so richly decorated, so perfumed in its initial appearance that Mendelssohn is at a loss to do more with it harmonically, and he can only proceed to simplify it in the ensuing variations.

The course which the first 13 of Beethoven’s variations follow is a pretty familiar one. Beethoven dresses out the harmonic skeleton of the bass with the sort of athletic choreography that the virtuoso tradition of his day demanded. Along the way, he manages to treat the theme pedantically with a canon in variation seven, rather pompously with a march in variation 11. And by a striking re-harmonisation of the Prometheus theme into C minor, a chill, bleak and wintry mood is established in variation six. Then beginning with the second minor key variation, variation 14, the work becomes truly Beethovenian in the combination of poetry and drama which moves inexorably towards the climax. And the climax in this case is a fugue into which Beethoven stirs the bass theme is subject. 

The Prometheus melody is a counter subject. In this fugue and in the coda of which follows it, Beethoven gives us a glimpse of several other elements which later become of sizeable contrapuntal dimension in the finale of Eroica symphony. It is here that this motif, that will combine with the bass theme in the symphony, is first introduced. The 16 measure contradance is about to become the 473 measure finale of the Eroica Symphony, and it’s here that we can see the imagination of Beethoven at work.