Jan Swafford writes in his Beethoven biography:
The variation form … amounts to studying a fundamental element of what composition is all about: taking a piece of material, an idea, and transforming it into new passages that share an underlying essence but sound different.
Throughout Beethoven’s career, variations-on-a-theme occupy a prominent role, both as compositions in themselves and as movements of longer works. Extracting a multitude of ideas from a simple source is central to how Beethoven conceived of music (e.g., the 5th Symphony).
Beethoven’s variations are often based on a theme that itself sounds rather silly or dopey. It’s as if Beethoven is demonstrating just how much can be done even with material that initially seems to show so little promise.
Marvels can be discovered in even the tiniest sources.
#Beethoven250 Day 26
Variations on “Es war einmal” from Dittersdorf’s “Das rote Käppchen” (WoO 66), 1792
Beethoven based these variations on a little aria from the 1788 opera Little Red Riding Hood by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Rintaro Akamatsu (@officelaparade) is at the piano.
It is unlikely that anyone alive today has seen a performance of Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf’s Little Red Riding Hood, but Beethoven played viola for a performance of the opera in Bonn in early 1792, and the variations he composed undoubtedly arose from that experience.
Imagine the opera is over. The audience has left. The musicians are packing up. But there is still more music to be heard. Ludwig has sat down at the piano or harpsichord, and he is extemporizing variations on one of the arias they've just played. It's composition in real time!