Beethoven: Diabelli Variations

🎼🎶 Your Daily Beethoven for June 2, 2024 

In 1819, the publisher Anton Diabelli wrote a short waltz and asked dozens of composers to each submit a variation on his original theme, with the intent of publishing all of them in a "patriotic anthology".

 
Beethoven responded with Veränderungen über einen Walzer, Op.120, the Diabelli variations, a prodigious set of 33 variations in which the mundane theme is "improved, parodied, ridiculed, disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and finally uplifted" (words and the following performance by Alfred Brendel).

  • John Scialdone
    published this page in Daily Beethoven 2024-06-01 23:40:24 -0400

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