Beethoven’s ‘Variations’ on Anton Diabelli’s waltz theme still reverberate today. Philippe Manoury is one of France’s leading contemporary composers. A researcher and pioneer of music with live electronics, Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli Variations’ would not let him go, ‘impossible to love the “Diabelli Variations” the way one loves the “Pastoral”’. But Manoury has not composed further variations on these Variations. On the contrary, he extracts individual elements and submerges these into his own idiom. This is no postmodern work, larded with references and quotes, but a work composed ‘while under the influence of Beethoven’.
