Diabelli Aching

Paralysis. 

Not writer's block because six blog entries, two unfinished short stories and two unsuccessful fringe shows maketh not a "writer". I am blogger - a blogger who chose to write about a subject he knows nearly nothing about and who now, standing before an Ayers Rock-size work of art, is paralyzed for something to say.

The monolith of art in question is Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. (I've learned that even though variations are several short pieces, they constitute a single work of art with a cumulative effect. So, "work of art" - singular. Thank you Aaron Copland's "What to Listen for in Music")

Now for some reason, I thought the Diabelli Variations were some slight lil' thing Beethoven tossed off between symphonies just to prove he was better than the other composers of his time. I pictured him composing the variations with his feet, while his hands did something real, like write a symphony or adjust his ear horn. 

What's the origin of this idea? 

I don't know.  

But I feel certain I bought the CD at Sonic Boom, a record shop in Toronto. At the time of purchase, Sonic Boom was attached to Honest Ed's, on Bathurst just south of Bloor. When my wife and I lived nearby, at Palmerston and Ulster in an small, angular attic apartment with a great skylight and a raccoon problem, my idea of a perfect day was getting a coffee and going to Sonic Boom, searching for a bit of happiness in the form of a used CD. (Sidenote: as I write this, raccoons are murder-fucking beneath our apartment window. Raccoons - my theme. No variations here, folks. Racoon racoon racoon.) The particular joy of Sonic Boom - a joy that set it apart for me - was the clack. When you first walked in, lined up in four or five waist level rectangles a few feet in front of the cash, they had all the recently arrived used CDs set out. Each rectangle had a sign saying what day of the week the CDs in it arrived. The CDs were divided by rows. There were two types of CDs per rectangle: regular CDs - rock, hip hop, alternative, country, RnB, blues, metal, everything except the section entitled "Jazz and Classical", off in the corner like the pimply kid on the playground who likes to read. And so me and whoever else was on the music hunt would stand in front of these things and quickly flip through the CDs, Yes or No'ing in our heads, and as CD case hit CD case - clack. Clack clack clack clack clack. Such a satisfying noise.  And when a lot of people were in there, it got loud enough to compete with whatever they were playing over the speakers. The CD clack. Pure joy. 

The CD cover is a black and white image of Daniel Barenboim's face. It looks like a negative, but inverse: his face is white and the whole background is black. Or at least that's what it looked like until three days ago when my 7 year old pulled it out and coloured Barenboim's face Smurf blue. Now when I play the album I picture him playing inside a polka dot mushroom. 

But why did I think the Variations were a "minor work"? I don't know, but the best I can come up with is that they're not the Goldberg Variations.  In my mind - and the mind of many, I think - the Goldberg Variations are inexorably connected to Glenn Gould, who as a Canadian, is basically our Beethoven. And Bach. And Mozart. He's not known for his compositions, no, but he is Canadian classical music. (I know that statement is wrong and I hope it irritates someone somewhere). He is iconic. And as an arty teenager living in Kitchener in the 90s, I went to see "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould" (1993, dir. Francois Girard): one short film for each of Bach's beautiful variations. It starred Colm Feore.  Feore, a star of the Stratford Festival, was already one of my theatre heroes and coupling him playing Gould with Bach's music almost made me cum a treble clef in iambic pentameter. It was formative.  And important.

So for me, the only Variations were the Goldberg Variations. Or rather the Feoreberg Variations. I have to watch that again. It still feels important. Though less important than the beer cooling on my window ledge.

Be right back.

Hi.  Have I said anything musically astute about the Variations yet?

No.

Well, I'm not going to.
But they floored me.
They completely floored me: with their vigour, humour, solemnity, beauty, inventiveness; their show-offy-ness and playfulness; their depth, their silliness, their scale, their mockery, their power and profundity, their variety and vast humanity.

I can't tell you anything about them historically or informationally that's not on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabelli_Variations

This is no minor work. This is the work of a great artist at full-power, glowing, relentless, taking a piece of light playful writing and elevating it, scorning it, deepening it, batting it around like a big cat and making it so much more than it was - and you know what is was because Theme and Variations begin with the theme. There it is. Track One.  Diabelli's little waltz, far too fast for anyone to dance to without tendon damage. And Beethoven brings it again at the middle (15), clearly mocking it, in case you'd forgotten the dross he turned to gold and again near the end, also, I think, as a reminder to the trip you've taken.

It's incredible. I won't go variation by variation, but variation 20, with its ocean-bed depth and sustain just slayed me. It's so modern, minimal, pared-down, and powerful.

Here's what Wikipedia says about it so I can stop it with the adjectives:

Variation 20: Andante

Variations 20–23 MENU 0:00

An extraordinarily slow-moving variation consisting almost entirely of dotted half notes in low registers – a striking contrast with the variations immediately before and after. Diabelli's melody is easily identified, but the harmonic progressions (see bars 9–12) are unusual and the overall tonality is ambiguous. Suggesting the title "Oracle", von Bülow recommends "an effect suggestive of the veiled organ-registers". Kinderman writes, "In this great enigmatic slow variation, No. 20, we have reached the still centre of the work ... the citadel of 'inner peace'".^[42] Tovey calls it "one of the most awe-inspiring passages in music".^[38] Brendel describes this Variation 20 as "hypnotic introspection" and offers as a title Inner sanctum. Liszt called it Sphinx. Diabelli's two-part structure is maintained, but without repeats.

I LOVED the Diabelli Variations.

I said I'd be loving stuff on this blog and I loved them.

Listen to them beginning to end. It's worth it.