Repertoire
Ludwig van Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, op. 120
Artists
Daniel Barenboim, piano
Program
In 1819, Anton Diabelli invited various composers to participate in a somewhat unusual contest. The challenge was, a priori, very simple: to compose a variation on a pleasant but insignificant waltz of 64 bars in C major, which he himself had written. A total of 50 composers were invited, some as outstanding as Franz Schubert, Carl Czerny and Beethoven. But Beethoven went much further, writing not just one variation, but thirty-three, creating a monumental masterpiece and one of the highest pinnacles of pianistic literature. Beethoven varies, reformulates, squeezes and twists the original theme into unknown worlds, but always —or almost always— like a Sisyphus that invariably returns to the Don in a spiral that is both sublime and diabolical.
We will have the privilege of hearing these Thirty-three variations —or mutations, in the words of the musician— performed by Daniel Barenboim, a living legend of the piano who has approached them on several occasions and has left a legacy of three reference recordings.
