Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, Op. 120

Featuring

Diana Boyle
Ludwig van Beethoven

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Compositional Technique

Beethoven includes a light-hearted pastiche of Mozart's 'Notte e giorno faticar' from Don Giovanni in Variation 22, which clears the serious mood and serves as an overture to the work's later seriousness.

Compositional Technique

Beethoven's Diabelli Variations maintain a close relationship to Diabelli's simple waltz theme, with 27 of 33 variations in C major and most in triple time, deriving variety from imaginative virtuosity rather than distortion.

Compositional Technique

Variation 20 of the Diabelli Variations achieves a gravity that prompted Donald Francis Tovey, a musicologist, to call it 'one of the most awe-inspiring passages in music'.

Critical Reception

Anton Diabelli, the publisher, recognized the greatness of Beethoven's variations, advertising them as a 'great and important masterpiece' and praising their 'original structures and ideas'.

Composition History

While other composers contributed one variation to Diabelli's project, Beethoven wrote 33 variations, which Diabelli published as a separate work in 1823.

Composition History

Anton Diabelli, an Austrian composer and music publisher, commissioned many Austrian composers, including Beethoven, to write a single variation on his theme for an album in 1819.

Performer Biography

Diana Boyle, the pianist on this recording, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1973 to study with Artur Balsam in New York, whose profound musical insight was a pivotal influence on her.