Musicon / Beethoven / Musical education / A theatrical play on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations
-A theatrical play on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations
Why did Beethoven, during the difficult last decade of his life, when he was deaf, chronically ill and often in financial straits, become nearly obsessed with writing an extensive and complex set of variations on a dumpy little waltz, a theme he had first dismissed as a “cobbler’s patch”?
That question drives “33 Variations,” the latest play by Moisés Kaufman, which opens on Monday at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. The production is directed by Mr. Kaufman, best known for “The Laramie Project.” Jane Fonda, in her first performance on a Broadway stage in 46 years, plays Dr. Katherine Brandt, an American musicologist who becomes as obsessed with solving the mystery of the “Diabelli” Variations as Beethoven was with composing the piece.
Whatever one’s take on “33 Variations” as a theater piece, it is an innovative and engrossing exercise in music appreciation. The pianist Diane Walsh plays extended excerpts from the “Diabelli” Variations, elegantly, in full view of the audience. In a way Ms. Walsh is a character in the play. I don’t think Ms. Fonda would object to my saying that Beethoven’s music is the star.
In the play, to conduct her research Katherine travels from New York to Bonn, Germany, where she works for several months at the hallowed Beethoven archive, studying sketches and manuscripts. But the story, which has the quality of a mystery, shifts in time to the Vienna of 1819 and 1823. Beethoven, Schindler and Diabelli appear as characters, often in overlapping scenes with Katherine, Dr. Gertrude Ladenburger, who is a librarian at the archive, and Katherine’s daughter, Clara, a restless young woman whose penchant for switching careers exasperates her disciplined mother. …
In one scene, as Ms. Walsh plays the gnarly and audacious double fugue (Variation No. 32), the rumpled, volatile Beethoven talks through the process of composing it, section by section. In another scene, as the archivist shows Katherine the manuscript pages containing Beethoven’s sketches for Variation No. 3, Ms. Walsh plays each fragment on the piano. Beethoven is aiming for something lyrically graceful, yet a little elusive in this variation. Each sketchy idea is fairly interesting. But what he settles on, which Ms. Walsh finally plays, is so much better. …
In No. 22, pouncing on the similarity of the waltz’s bass line to Leporello’s emphatic melody in the opening scene of “Don Giovanni” (“Notte e giorno faticar”), Beethoven creates a comic homage to that famous Mozart moment. A clue to the mystery of the “Diabelli” Variations and Beethoven’s complex attitude is buried in this variation, Mr. Kaufman maintains. Leporello’s ambivalence about his master comes through in his complaint: he serves Giovanni well but resents living in servitude; he both condemns and envies Giovanni’s seductive prowess with women. …
In a recent interview Ms. Walsh said that though she first started working on the “Diabelli” Variations almost 30 years ago, after graduating from Juilliard, she did not perform the piece until 2004. At various points in the play she performs the waltz and 10 variations complete, and portions of 14 more. Nine are never played.
“The hardest thing about it,” she said, “is to be sitting there during stretches when I am not playing and getting cooled off.” The production has been a “total immersion experience,” Ms. Walsh said, and a fantastically interesting break from routine concert life. The play has given her new insights into Beethoven’s daunting score.
“It’s really a wild and crazy journey,” she said. “I love the chameleon quality of the variations. At the most tragic moments, Beethoven claps his hands and says, ‘Just kidding.’ ”
For Mr. Kaufman the mystery of why Beethoven was so drawn to Diabelli’s waltz touches on elusive matters about the creative process. “But I think that the stage is particularly well suited to capturing things that are elusive,” he said. “Behavior is elusive, and drama captures behavior.”
Everything Katherine does in the play, Mr. Kaufman first did in creating it, he said, including reading the Beethoven letters, journals and biographies and traveling to the archive in Bonn. “I feel like an experienced musicologist but of only one piece.”
Meanwhile, at preview performances of “33 Variations,” Ms. Walsh’s splendid recording for JDR (Jonathan Digital Recordings), available in the lobby, has been “selling like hotcakes,” Mr. Kaufman said. You can just imagine Beethoven fighting with Diabelli over how to split the profits from this venture.
From the New York Times; excerpts, edited by Musicon
Cf. at Amazon: Diane Walsh, 33 Variations