Memory Test

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 11

Memory Test

[N 1823 the publisher Diabelli wrote a simple waltz and invited composers in Austria to submit one variation each. Beethoven responded along with 50 others; he was then busy sketching out his Ninth Symphony, put this aside for the time, and with his thoughts still running on a vast scale, turned out 33 Piano variations instead of one. I don’t think it follows that because Beethoven took a spell from writing the Ninth Symphony to compose the Diabelli Variations, he would expect us to take two spells during the hearing of these variations and fill each with a week’s work at other things. Yet strangely enough, while we have become used to taking the Ninth Symphony at one sitting, 2YC is giving these seldom-heard variations in three weekly batches, though one would expect there to be more variety in a set of variations lasting about an hour. all told, than in a symphony lasting 80 minutes. The catch about listening to variations is that one has to remember the theme to make any sense of them. Last year when 2YC played another grand rarity, Bach’s 30 Goldberg Variations, and dividing them into three parts, it was galling to find Bach’s theme so elusive that we had lost the whole thread of the affair by the time the second and third Saturdays came round. This time like the wise thrush we tovk no chances; we leapt on the theme, sang it several times over, and ordered the rest of the family to do the same daily (Continued on next page)

RADIO VIEWSREEL -(Continued- from: previous page) for the next fortnight. The result will probably be that Diabelli’s simple, healthy waltz will have life everlasting in our bathroom; while the outlines of the magnificent structure Beethoven built upon it are blurred and truncated.