Six Variations on an original theme in F major Op.34 (1802)

Beethoven’s Op.34 and Op.35 were the first sets of variations which he dignifid with an opus umber. He was very conscious of the fact and, when the work were being engraved, he wrote to his publisher asking him to make a special point of it in a preface to the score. Up to that time he had written a dozen sets of piano variations, some of them very ambitious, all of them written with the limitations of what was then the most popular and the least enterprising of classical forms. Conventionally a theme for variations was binary in structure, with the two parts of equal length (often eight bars each); and the variations would preserve the same key, the same metre, often the same tempo, the same binary form, and even the same harmonies as the theme itself.

In 1802 Beethoven deliberately set out to change all that, and so began the process by which the variations – culminating in the Diabelli set of 1823 – were elevated to a status at least equal to that of the sonata. He told his publisher that both Op.34 and Op.35 were ~’written in a quite new way” and were “different from any othrs.” A note in a sketchbook, next to the theme of Op.34, indicate how his mind was working: “each variation in a different time signature.” In fact, he went further. The theme is a ternary structure, and so are all the six variations. But only the first of them is in the same Adagio tempo and 2/4 metre as the theme. Moreover, although the theme is in F major, the first variation in in D major, and th next four follow at a distance of a third – the second (Allegro ma non troppo in 6/8) in B flat, the third (Allegretto in 4/4) in G, the fourth (Tempo di Menuetto) in E flat, the fifth (Marcia: allegretto) in D minor modulating back to F major for the sixth variation (Allegretto in 6/8) and the ornamented repeat of the original theme.

Before Beethoven grappled with them, the conventions of classical variation form were more of an inhibition than an inspiration. There are many delightful examples by Mozart and Haydn but, with the exception of the latter’s double Variations in F minor, they wrote nothing in that form to compare with the best of their sonata movements – still less the best of baroque variations such as Bach’s monumental “Goldberg” structure, which remained unchallenged until Beethoven completed his Diabelli Variations in 1823.

For his first dozen sets of piano variations, none of them dignified by an opus number, even Beethoven accepted the limitations of the genre. At Heiligenstadt in 1802, however, with the Six Variations on an Original Theme Op.34 and the Fifteen Variations and Fugue Op.35 he deliberately set out to revolutionise the form. As he later told his publisher, “Usually I have to wait for other people to tell me where I have new ideas…But this time I myself can assure you that in both these works the manner is quite new for me” – and, one might add, quite new for everyone else too.

There is a clue to his thinking in a sketchbook where, next to the theme of Op.34, he wrote “each variation in a different time signature.” Sure enough, whereas conventionally all the variations would be in the same 2/4 metre as the theme itself, there are some, like the fourth headed Tempo di Menuetto and the fifth headed Marcia, with a very distinct metrical identity. At the same time, whereas conventionally the variations would be in the same key as the theme (with one in the minor), they are all different here, following a logical progression from the F major of theme to the D major of the elaborately decorative first variation by way of the C minor of the fifth (making it not just a march but a funeral march) back to F major of the sixth variation, the ornamental recall of the original theme as a combined cadenza and coda. There’s still a long way to g from Op.34 to the Diabelli Variations but it’s a great start.