Sunday 'n the hood with Ludwig

Doors open at 3:30, music starts at 4. The program is indeed all-Beethoven, his last piano sonata, op. 111, followed by the Diabelli Variations. This is quite a bit of music, and the whole event should wrap up by 6. If you can't stay the entire time, you may sneak out the kitchen door at any point, or leave during intermission.

This is a somewhat self-similar program, with the first half reflecting the entire program. Beethoven's last piano sonata op. 111, has just two movements, a rather typical sonata-allegro first movement and a much more substantial Arietta with variations that reach heavenward, as earthly considerations for time and space recede to the background.

Then comes Beethoven's magnum opus for piano, the op. 120 Diabelli variations that last about an hour! In 1819 composer Antonin Diabelli wrote a rather mundane waltz and invited all of the important composers (including Schubert, Hummel, and even Liszt!) to write variations on it, with the intention of fundraising for survivors of the Napoleonic Wars. In typical fashion, Beethoven went way overboard, writing 33 variations in a period of 4 years that transmogrify Diabelli's banal source material into something transcendent and divine.