Primary Sources.(The Talk of the Town)(new play "33 Variations")

In 1819, the music publisher Anton Diabelli wrote a waltz and sent it to fifty composers, asking each to contribute a variation. They all agreed, except one--Ludwig van Beethoven, who dismissed the waltz as a Schusterfleck, or "cobbler's patch." But then something happened: Beethoven became obsessed with Diabelli's waltz, and ended up writing thirty-three variations that constitute one of his most beloved pieces for piano--Opus 120. (Imagine Harold Bloom writing a six-hundred-page treatise on "The Biggest Loser.") So why did Beethoven do it? That is the question that haunts Dr. Katherine Brandt, the character played by Jane Fonda in the new play "33 Variations," who is loosely based on Dr. William Kinderman, a musicologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the leading authority on the "Diabelli Variations."

"There is no doubt that Beethoven had an ironic attitude toward the waltz," Kinderman was saying, in the lounge of the Crowne Plaza, before the opening-night performance. As a graduate student in 1979, he spent a month poring over manuscripts at the Beethoven archive, in Bonn. His biggest breakthrough had to do with the time line of the piece: the variations that were written last--including Nos. 1, 15, and 25--tend to relate more closely to the original theme, hinting that Beethoven's intentions evolved. "It's a paradox," Kinderman said. "If he's taking over this waltz by Diabelli, which has banal and repetitious features, and he's writing a gigantic work, then how does he reconcile those two tendencies? He did it by adding more variations that go back pointedly to the theme, in ways that exaggerate the banal features--that take it into the area of caricature." In the final variations, Beethoven lifts the piece beyond parody. "There's an ennobling process, a spiritualization, that goes on," Kinderman continued. "But there's a wink at the original theme in the last moments. It's as if Beethoven is looking back and saying, 'Well, I could have written even more.' "

About five years ago, Kinderman got an e-mail from the playwright Moises Kaufman, who had taken an interest in the "Diabelli Variations" after chatting with a salesman at Tower Records. Kaufman visited Kinderman in Illinois, where they engaged in "intense brainstorming ...