Diabelli Variations

I’m sort of a theme & variations junkie.  From Bach to Coltrane, they show just what a musician can do when taking a single melody and running with it.  A while back I posted Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which didn’t really improvise the main melody but came up with new ones while repeating the bass line.  Subsequent composers usually varied the melody by elaborating on bits of it, like in this Beethoven set. This set came about after the musician and (more importantly) publisher, Anton Diabelli, sent a waltz melody to the leading German composers of the time and requested each of them to write a variation on it.  Beethoven thought the melody was garbage and ignored it at first. One story has him changing his mind when he learned that other respected composers (Czerny and Hummel, a sometimes rival) were doing it.  Or maybe he decided that the melody was pliable enough to accomplish something.  Most likely Diabelli simply offered Beethoven money to compose multiple variations; he knew they’d sell.  Beethoven wrote 33 variations.  Like Coltrane working a show tune, these 33 get pretty far out there, way ahead of their time.  There’s everything from mockery of the melody (“this melody is shit”) to transcendance (“look what I can do with even a shitty melody”) and, well, who knows what to call it.  There have been plenty of great theme and variation works since, but none have put a melody through the wringer quite like this. 

Beethoven was a master of improvisation; he wrote other such sets, but also worked variations into his symphonies, piano sonatas, string quartets, etc.  If you want a shorter example, try the second (and final) movement of his piano sonata #32, his last, where he twists a hymn-like melody all over the place before landing in long, brutal, and otherworldly trills that would cripple a normal hand.  The second movement starts at 9:00 if you don’t want to hear the first.

Forgotten Gem

Probably my favorite EJ song.  It’s the second half of a medley that opens Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.  It (along with the opening song, the instrumental Funeral For a Friend) got quite a bit of airplay on FM radio when the album was released.  This was the glory days of FM, when stations played deep tracks.  You never heard it on AM, which stuck to singles.  It gets left out of “best of” compilations, and many EJ fans don’t know it.  I don’t get why.  This song has everything going for it, including a killer bass line.  It’s one of the songs I used to teach myself bass when I got one in 10th grade.

Cults Cults Cults


I’ve posted twice on them. Here’s a third. They excel at hooks, often recycled 60’s girl group ones. Who cares? Not I. Two albums, Cults and Static, are worth playing all the way through. I think I was underwhelmed by the others, but I sampled them quickly so could have misjudged.

Decisions, Decisions


If you’ve ever wondered why there are a thousand different recordings of some music, here’s Leonard Bernstein showing why: there are a thousand different ways to play it. Printed music can only tell you so much. Of course, some of those thousand recordings are copying one another, but with these guys you always got something unique. They had their off days like anyone, but when they were on…

The Soprano

Samuel Mariño is a rarity in opera: a true male soprano.

Rather than relying on falsetto as a countertenor would, Mariño, 28, is able to comfortably sing high notes with his chest voice. Now he is branching out from Baroque parts originally written for castrati.

“The teachers were trying to treat me as a countertenor. I had to sing lower when I could sing much higher. Being a countertenor is an established thing, and they were trying to put me into that box. Then, in 2017, I met Barbara Bonney. A friend told me that I sing very much like her. I wrote to her and said: “Hi. I’m Samuel and I want to take lessons with you.” I went to Salzburg, Austria, and Barbara was like a fairy godmother. She told me to sing how I speak, to just put notes to my speaking voice. And that is what I do today.”

Your new album starts with a famous Mozart aria written for a woman who is playing a man. What do you bring to the role as a male singer?

“My voice is a light lyric soprano, with a bit of coloratura. In the score, Cherubino is a soprano role, but today it’s for mezzo-sopranos and their male-ish colors. If you talk to any mezzo, they will tell you it’s very hard to sing Cherubino, because it’s quite high — not super high notes, but sitting all the time in a high tessitura. Cherubino is a young teenager, and I do him as a boy who is innocent and confused. It’s a totally different vision of how the role can be sung.”