ME21's Deleuzabelli Variations X is a project grounded in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, William Kindermans’s book Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (1987), and Michel Butor’s Dialogue avec 33 variations de Ludwig van Beethoven sur une valse de Diabelli (1971). It exposes Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations op. 120 to several musical encounters, letting other times and styles interfere with Beethoven, and making unconnected connections happen. In the time-frame of the original piece diverse techniques of elimination, substitution and replacement are used. Alongside interventions from other times and styles, including composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Cramer, six new pieces were especially written for this performance.
The title is a triple homage: to Beethoven, Gilles Deleuze and Anton Diabelli. Beethoven’s music functions as the backbone structure of the performance, while Deleuze’s idea of differential repetition provides a sort of method related to processes of continuous transformation and permanent becoming; and Diabelli’s name must be highly praised, for without him none of this would ever have happened.
From the Diabelli Variations to the Deleuzabelli Variations
Beethoven’s Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli in C major, op. 120 (1819-1823), are widely known as a work of exhilarating humor, one of those pieces where the utmost elaborated compositional techniques are combined with concrete operations of historical reinterpretation, quotations and musical parody. The work originated with a commission by the Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli (1781-1858), who invited fifty composers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to write one variation on a waltz theme of his own invention. The list of composers included Schubert, Hummel, Czerny, a very young Liszt, the son of Mozart, and some of the keyboard virtuosi of those days, such as Friedrich Kalkbrenner and Ignaz Moscheles. Beethoven first refused, but later accepted the commission delivering not one but thirty-three variations. Instead of simply contributing to a collective publication, he composed an autonomous set of variations — a work that, together with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, remains at the apex of this musical form.
The theme, which Beethoven early disdained as a “cobbler's patch”, is of disarming simplicity: a danceable waltz in C major, straightforward in its rhythm and simplistic in its harmonies — a very timely waltz that could have been written by many other Viennese composers of the day. Immediately in the first variation Beethoven rebels against this timely character of the music, composing a laconic march in binary rhythm, radically departing from the original waltz and suggesting a path of infinite freedom. Beethoven’s thirty-three transformations of the theme do not merely vary or decorate it; they build independent entities that relate more to each other or to other musical works than to Diabelli’s waltz. In Variation XXII — Allegro molto — Beethoven explicitly refers to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, quoting Leporello’s entry aria “Notte e Giorno faticar”, which alludes to the uneasy relations between servant and master, the virtuous worker and the immoral debauchee. The following variations, from XXIII to XXVIII, continue this line of parody, including hidden quotes and references to a piano Etude by J.B. Cramer (XXIII), a Bach chorale (XXIV), a Schubertian German dance (XXV), and to Beethoven himself (XXVIII). Furthermore, the last section of the piece – from variation XXIX to XXXIII - retraces a particular path of music history, going from an early Baroque lamento (XXIX) and canon (XXX) to a powerful fugue in the style of Handel (XXXII), including a reference to Bach’s 25th Goldberg Variation (XXXI) and a Minuet (XXXIII) that starts in the style of Haydn but concludes with an auto-referential Coda, which resonates the last movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, op. 111. Thus, Beethoven enters a dialogue with music history — an evocation of styles and idioms that absorb an almost encyclopedic range of contexts, historical and contemporary. If the collective work commissioned by Diabelli to fifty composers defines a very timely musical catalogue of those days (bringing together “composers and virtuosi from Vienna and other Austrian states” as one can read in the frontispiece of the original print), Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations can be seen as a catalogue of untimely musical structures, of musical events detached from their time of birth and presented in a different kind of temporality — a time outside of time, pure musical time.
The Deleuzabelli Variations further explore this game with history and with diverse times. There are four basic elements: the original Beethoven variations, which are played on a piano; new arrangements of some of Beethoven variations, for ensemble; the pieces to which Beethoven explicitly or latently referred to (Mozart, Cramer, Bach), which are played in arrangements for the ensemble; and brand new pieces, commissioned by ME21 to living composers, which should be variations on Beethoven’s variations and not on Diabelli’s theme.
