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In 1819 Vienna, history tells us, the music publisher Diabelli asked each of the popular composers of his day to compose a single piano variation on a simple waltz Diabelli had written. Beethoven scoffed at it, then changed his mind. In this ingenious and insightful play, we watch him surmount deafness and ill health as he composes over the next three years not just a single variation but a set of thirty-three, one of the finest in musical history. We hear selections from them throughout the play, played by a pianist on stage. We watch as Beethoven, endangered by his defiance of critics, landlords, and tyrants, nevertheless increases steadily the number of his variations, even while working diligently on a mass and his monumental ninth symphony. Scholars have long wondered why.

 

While meeting Beethoven we also catch up, in modern day America, with the musicologist Katherine Brandt, who has decided to answer the question: How could the master waste his genius on such a musical mediocrity? She will go to the Beethoven Archives in Bonn, Germany, and inspect sketches of the variations in Beethoven’s original hand. She must go despite her own failing health -- she is increasingly crippled by a terminal and devastating nerve disease (ALS) -- and despite pleas by her daughter Clara to be cared for at home.

 

Katherine, intent on professional achievement, is as coldly dismissive of Clara’s attempts at care-giving as she is of Clara’s varying artistic career paths, not to mention her run-of-the-mill boyfriends. Nevertheless, after a few weeks, both Clara and her sympathetic boyfriend travel to Bonn to care for her mother. At the Archives Katherine is befriended by its opinionated but kind director, Gertrude Ladenburger.  As they research the sketches and become friends, Gertie observes how Katherine dismisses her admirable daughter as mediocre, much as she does Diabelli’s waltz, and candidly tells her so.

 

From the opening onward, the two worlds of Katherine and Beethoven seamlessly intertwine, often becoming virtually simultaneous when the characters in each world use the stage at the same time. As Gertie points to food stains on a sketch, Beethoven rails at the soup he is eating.  A decrepit Beethoven collapses in pain while a crippled Katherine submits to an MRI.  Or the locales separate, as Beethoven finds solace in nature at a countryside retreat; Katherine finds it at home, where Clara helps with her physical therapy.

 

Later, Clara astutely helps her mother with the editing of her manuscript on the variations. By the end, Katherine comes to understand that Gertie was right. Clara is far from mediocre.  Katherine sees in her a myriad of possibilities, as Beethoven, she realizes, did in Diabelli’s waltz.  In the final scene, we see Clara in full bloom as she reads impressively to an academic assembly from the finished manuscript her mother, before she died, asked her to deliver.