By Ted Mills, Santa Barbara News Press
Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations is an odd beast in the composers’ oeuvre. Our four years he worked on 33 variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, putting aside more pressing (and famous) compositions to add to its number. Why this job obsessed him, and what pushed him forward, is part of Moises Kaufman’s 2009 Broadway play, “33 Variations” which currently is on at the Ojai Art Center Theater in an adventurous new production by director Richard Camp.
But Beethoven is only part of the play. A parallel story features a modern day musicologist named Katherine Brandt. Just like Beethoven succumbed to deafness during his career, Brandt has ALS, and watches as her body betrays her while she attempts to finish her research into the mysterious work.
The play features projections as well as a live piano performance by Aaron Embry. It’s a complicated show to mount, but director Camp is okay with it.
“I chose the play,” he says, “because I felt confident that with the people available at the Art Center Theater we could demonstrate that we have the ability to tackle such a show. I also chose it because Ojai has a world-famous music festival with a community attuned to good music.”
The play would be nothing without the excitement of hearing these classical works played live. Mr. Embry, who is a multi-instrumentalist comfortable in both classical and singer-songwriter genres, was recommended to the production by Thacher Schools’s Greg Haggard, and can more than handle these complex works.
“The Diabelli Variations are some of Beethoven’s most esoteric and experimental piano writings,” Mr. Embry says, “but there are still fundamental ‘Beethoven-isms’ in them. The wide spectrum and diverse character in them make them a wonderful source to dramatic underscore. It has been fun to experience how the pieces support the scenes in the play.”
The director was worried at first over whether Mr. Embry would understand the balance between performance and how it fit in with the show. But he needn’t have worried.
“We were kindred spirits from day one,” Mr. Camp says. “Aaron has magic fingers, and his contributions to the play are irreplaceable.”
Cecil Sutton plays the composer and Tracey Williams Sutton plays Katherine. Andra Belknap plays Katherine’s daughter Clara, Sean Love Mason plays Diabelli, Deven Dornbos plays Mark, Shayne Bourdon plays Anton Schindler, and Lynn Van Emmerick plays Gertrude Ladenburger.
Mr. Camp grew up poor in the South and did not have exposure to classical music at home. That changed in school, where he first heard Beethoven.
“Something about it did speak to me,” he says. “The passion, the heartbreaking beauty, the emotion, the technique. It’s a hard-hearted person who can listen to the second movement of the Fifth Piano Concerto with being moved to tears. And when I started reading about his personal life and his beliefs, well, those just dovetailed with my own.”
The connection continues, but in a different way. Mr. Camp has slowly been losing his hearing since college, and that was decades ago.
“There is a brilliant line in the play,” he says, “where Beethoven, after losing his hearing, then getting it back, then losing it again, finally gave up hope that it would return, and it actually freed him to create music that would have never been possible had he been in the world of the hearing. It’s an exquisite speech.”
But the Variations are also a way to understanding life, Mr. Camp says.
“The form allows Beethoven to do the miraculous and slow down time, to pierce the waltz an enter the minutiae that life, in its hast, robs us of. I hope that audiences get this, and get to see what a funny, angry, raging human being Beethoven really was.”