There is no better example of a great musical work rooted in commonplace experience than Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli’ Variations. Hans von Bülow dubbed the thirty-three variations ‘a microcosm of Beethoven’s art’, and Alfred Brendel has described them as ‘the greatest of all piano works’. Yet this enormous musical edifice was built from a trivial waltz that the composer originally dismissed as ‘a cobbler’s patch’ on account of its mechanical sequences! In order to appreciate the Variations fully we should savour their paradoxical origins. Not only did Beethoven ennoble Diabelli’s theme by transforming it into a variety of shapes and characters, but he also subjected it to critique, poking fun at its primitive aspects. The ‘Diabelli’ Variations create a uniquely coherent design of vast dimensions, filling nearly an hour in performance time.