On the musical form Variations....

Variation is potentially the most "open" of musical procedures, one that gives the greatest freedom to a composer's fantasy. It mirrors the unpredictability and chance nature of human experience and keeps alive the openness of human expectation. Fate cannot knock at the door in the variation form: such concepts as necessity and inevitability need a dialectical musical pattern within which to express their message, whereas the variation form is discursive and peripatetic, in flight from messages and ideologies. Its subject is the adventurer, the picaro, 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.

Variation is the form of shifting moods, alternations of feeling, shades of meaning, dislocations of perspective. It shatters appearance into splinters of previously unperceived reality and, by an act of will, reassembles the fragments at the close. The sense of time is effaced—expanded, contracted—by changes in tempo; space and mass dissolve into the barest outline of the harmonic progressions and build up once again into intricate structures laden with richly ornamented pattern. The theme abides throughout as an anchor, as though to prevent fantasy from losing contact with the outer world, but it is ever in process of dissolving into the memories, images, and feelings that underlie its simple reality.

Two thirds of the Beethoven Diabelli Variations were drafted in 1819, but the set was taken up again in late 1822, completed in the spring of 1823, and published in June 1823 by the firm of Cappi and Diabelli, who perceptively announced it as "a great and important masterpiece worthy to be ranked with the imperishable creations of the old Classics," entitled "to a place beside Sebastian Bach's famous masterpiece in the same form."" Bachian and Handelian tendencies are much in evidence here, especially in the devotional fughetta of variation 24, which might have issued from the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, and in the extended double fugue of variation 32. Beethoven combines melodic and harmonic variation techniques, both as Mozart had done before him and in accordance with his own practice in the "Eroica" Variations, op. 35, and in the finale of the Eroica Symphony.

p 396, Beethoven, Maynard Solomon