Diane Walsh, pianist: News

Three years ago I heard from a colleague that a theater group was looking for a pianist who played Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. I had just performed them a few months earlier, so I phoned the offices of the Tectonic Theater Company in New York City, where I live. My call soon led to an audition, on a dubious upright piano in a rehearsal studio near Times Square. That was my first meeting with Moisés Kaufman, the brilliant playwright and director (I Am My Own Wife, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Laramie Project), and my first exposure to his obsession with Beethoven's extraordinary work, which grips the imagination as few piano pieces do. On that occasion, I played about the first third of the piece, then skipped to the fugue and the finale, and could see instantly that Moises was as enthralled as I was by the music. When I learned that his play was about Katherine, a Beethoven scholar who travels to Bonn to study the sketchbooks of the Diabelli Variations in the Beethoven Archive there, I felt a shiver of recognition: coincidentally, I had once applied for a fellowship in Germany to do just that.

My own fascination with the Diabelli, dating from my student years, has only deepened as I worked with Moises and talented actors as the play emerged from improvisation, overnight rewrites and many impassioned discussions exploring the music's enriched meaning in a theatrical context.
The Diabelli has always intrigued me more than any other set of variations; even the august "Goldberg" has not drawn me as much as this "gigantic cycle of bagatelles," as the Beethoven biographer Maynard Solomon called them. These pieces, many of them only a minute or less in length, show the full range of Beethoven's difficult and complex character: his rough humor, his impatience, his rages and abrupt mood changes, his delight in parody and practical jokes, his gift for the simple, the pastoral, and the sublime.

The variations show the evolution of Beethoven's thoughts about Anton Diabelli's simple two-part waltz, which he at first found almost ludicrously simple-minded and then, as the implications of its potential for variation grew on him, became an obsession. The genius outpouring that resulted wrings every bit of utility and meaning out of this scrap of theme; even the opening grace note earns several of its own variations.

The theme is not so much a waltz as it is a ländler-like dance. The melody, a tuba-like, oom-pah tune, is presented in the bass, and is accompanied by unpromising repeated chords in the right hand. These repetitions re-emerge later, transposed to the bass (Nos. 2, 14, 21) or kept in the treble (Nos. 10, 25) and eventually, in No. 32, they form one of the themes of the climatic triple fugue. After the theme's midpoint, the structure of the first 16 bars is repeated almost verbatim, in the dominant key, and ends with a resounding V-I cadence-- in all, a symmetrical, conventional structure, which Beethoven explodes immediately.
The sketchbooks show that the first variation to be written was No. 3, a little miracle of questioning lyricism, with an odd breaking-off in the second part, as if the composer were lost in thought; meanwhile, the left hand meanders on the first three notes of the theme. But before No. 3, we are given No. 1, which changes the theme's ¾ waltz meter to a martial 4/4, and No. 2, which gently vamps with alternating hands as Beethoven begins to explore other harmonic universes to use in the second part. There are corresponding places in almost all the variations where Beethoven confounds our expectations of a conventional modulation, and the keys he later hints at momentarily are as far from C major as can be: D minor, E minor, D-flat major, F minor, F-sharp minor and B-flat minor. My favorite destabilizing harmonic shock occurs in No. 17, where in the second half the harmony veers wildly into B minor, as if the earth had suddenly left its axis, and then as suddenly resumes its proper rotation around the dominant and tonic of C major.

The variations give us humor: the "knock-knock, who's there?" joke of No. 13; grotesquerie and parody: Nos. 21, 23, 27, 28; virtuosity: Nos. 16, 17, 21; solemnity: Nos. 20, 24; innocence and playfulness : Nos. 18, 19, 25. There is tragedy, too, in Nos. 29, 30 and 31, C-minor variations that sink from melancholy to florid despair. But the gloom is quickly banished by the energy and optimism of the No. 32 , a lengthy and powerful triple fugue in the new key of E-flat. Beethoven transforms the repeated-note accompaniment figure from the waltz into his first theme and creates a simple stepping-down-by-thirds motive for his second theme. The third theme, which runs along in rapid 16th notes, is only introduced in the last third of the variation.

The final variation, No. 33, has the feeling of a coda, and is also one of the longest variations. The tension and drama of the three minor-key variations and the following fugue need time to wind down, and the decision to end the work, not with bombast, but with a graceful dance, leaves a final impression of Beethoven deep in thought. The spinning out of right-hand figuration is like the finale, also in C major, of Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, completed the same year. Diabelli's waltz has been transformed, after a demanding but exhilarating journey of 55 minutes, into an ethereal minuet.

I'm back from Washington, D.C., where I spent August and September at Arena Stage, as The Pianist in a brilliant new play by Moises Kaufman, about Beethoven, the creative process, and the nature of obsession. (You can read more about it, and listen to an NPR item about it, on the Links page.) I played portions of Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" throught the play. The beautiful Steinway piano had its own niche built for it, at the front of the stage. The high point for me came in the second act, when Graeme Malcolm, as Beethoven, and I have a duet, during which he composes the penultimate variation, a fugue. The audience hears him describe the music a split second before they hear me play it. The timing had to be perfect, so it would seem as if he were evoking the music with his words. Most nights this scene stopped the show.

The play is unusual in its use of Beethoven's glorious music as the glue to hold the drama together. Of course the play is ABOUT the music, but it is also about the characters, in both the 19th and 21st centuries, and I somehow felt as if the music itself was functioning as another character in the play. I found myself tearing up at the same places almost every night, and watching the performances on stage nightly was compelling to me, as a witnessing, but also participating, member of the ensemble. I certainly never got bored or tired of the show, despite the schedule of eight shows a week for a month.

Even though I'm a veteran performer, in this production I had the the feeling of entering a whole new world which has its own rituals, lore and superstitions. On opening night I got lovely handwritten notes from the actors, the director and the stage manager, plus thoughtful little gifts left in my dressing room. It's very different from the music world, where usually I'm given a five-minute call and a stage crew member ushers me unceremoniously into the wings--and flowers arrive after the show, not before. At Arena Stage my dresser peeked in to my dressing room every night to wish me a good show. From the dressers' point of view, I was a fairly low-maintenance member of the cast, (since I only had one costume and no wig) but for me it was an unaccustomed luxury to have my my costume maintained (i.e. buttons sewn back on) and drycleaned once a week, eliminating the dreaded garment bag schlepping to and from the theater.

Now that I'm back home to my normal musical life, I miss the cameraderie with the actors, the dim blue light in the wings, the choreographed curtain calls, and our late nights at Tunnicliff's Tavern on SE 7th street for pizza washed down with drafts of beer. Fortunately, some of the actors --Graeme amd wife, plus Mary Beth Peil, who played the present-day musicologist, Erik Steele, who played Beethoven's secretary, Greg Keller, who played the nurse, and Susan Kellerman, who played the music librarian-- are all coming to my recital this weekend. It should be a great reunion.