Beethoven's WoO ('werke ohne opuszahl', works without an opus number) numbers scare away a lot of listeners. They say, "Since Beethoven didn't care to give an opus number, he didn't care about it" or "Beethoven thought it was immature or second rate music." However, these are dazzling sets of variations, probably originating from Beethoven's live improvisations and therefore were not conceived to be published works (though most of them were published soon after they were written). Among these variations are some of the most challenging, creative, and wildly ingenious developments of piano technique of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the very same elements that would lay the foundations for Beethoven's 5 great Piano Concerti, his unsurpassed body of 32 piano sonatas, and his use of the piano in chamber music. ...
The 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli Op. 120, commonly known as the Diabelli Variations, is a set of variations for the piano written between 1819 and 1823 by Beethoven on a waltz composed by Anton Diabelli. One of the supreme compositions for the piano, it often shares the highest honours with Bach's Goldberg Variations. The distinguished music writer Donald Francis Tovey has called it "the greatest set of variations ever written." Pianist Alfred Brendel has described it as simply "the greatest of all piano works." It also comprises, in the words of Hans von Bülow, "a microcosm of Beethoven's art." Or, as Martin Cooper writes in Beethoven: The Last Decade 1817 - 1827, "The variety of treatment is almost without parallel, so that the work represents a book of advanced studies in Beethoven's manner of expression and his use of the keyboard, as well as a monumental work in its own right." ...
from Wikipedia, Diabelli Variations
Piano Variations, Bagatellen and other small works
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