By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Arena Stage opened this season with a play that riffs on an improbable work by Ludwig van Beethoven, the "Diabelli" Variations.

Mois¿s Kaufman's "33 Variations," which runs through the end of this month, is fiction, but it may leave many theatergoers wanting more facts about the music.

The last works of Beethoven -- the Symphony No. 9, the "Missa Solemnis," the late string quartets, the final piano pieces and the variations -- are music of the spheres, mercurial, mysterious and never to be entirely understood. Whether or not it was the composer's encroaching deafness (with which he had lived for some two decades) that gives these pieces their marvelous remove, there is no doubt that they are profoundly interior music. We feel as though we are listening through the aural equivalent of some cosmic telescope, making palpable contact with another dimension, however distant it may be.

Beethoven's last great work for piano was the "Diabelli" Variations, written between 1819 and 1823. And it might be the single best example in musical history of a genius mining what might have seemed barren land for infinitely more than it was worth. The composer took a rambunctious snippet of musical doggerel by the publisher Anton Diabelli and stretched it out into an hour of 33 ruminations that are as strange as they are cosmic.

Kaufman's play riffs on the creation of this improbable work. The question, as Kaufman sees it, is a simple one: Why would someone of Beethoven's stature choose such a trivial melody and spend four years on it?

Why indeed? Maynard Solomon, perhaps Beethoven's best biographer, explains the temptation as follows: "Variation is potentially the most open of musical procedures, one that gives the greatest freedom to a composer's fantasy." Solomon compares the theme in a set of variations to a hero in an adventure novel -- "the quick-change artist, the impostor, the phoenix who ever rises from the ashes, the rebel who, defeated, continues his quest, the thinker who doubts perception, who shapes and reshapes reality in search of its inner significance, the omnipotent child who plays with matter as God plays with the universe."

By the time Beethoven began work on Diabelli's waltz, he had already written some 60 sets of variations and he seems to have wanted to go out in style. What better way than to undertake a vast adventure in musical alchemy? Earlier in his career, Beethoven had written 32 Variations on an Original Theme; in the "Diabelli" Variations, he added one more digression, as though to top himself. (The only other set of keyboard variations in the same league as the "Diabelli," Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, comes to total of 32 movements, if you include the two performances of the Aria that begins and ends it.)

Yet it is the incredible variety of the music that takes the "Diabelli" Variations to a new level. There are marches, waltzes, nocturnes, chorales, fugues -- even a quote from Mozart's "Don Giovanni." As the scholar Ernest Walker wrote: "We find side by side grim uncouthness and unearthly serenity, wild passion and noble majesty, inconsequential antics and delicate charm, tortuous involutions and limpid simplicity." In short, as was once said of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," "here is God's plenty."

There have been several worthwhile recordings of the "Diabelli" Variations. Maurizio Pollini, on Deutsche Grammophon, exults in this brainy score and plays it brilliantly. Alfred Brendel, on Philips, is somewhat more reserved, but his tendency toward a certain classical pedantry is welcome here, as a steadying agent. Still, those who want a souvenir of "33 Variations" may wish to pick up a new disc from Jonathan Digital Recordings that features Diane Walsh, the very fine pianist who performs extended passages from the score throughout the play. (For information: http://www.jonathandigital.com.)