Variations on Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu, Op. 121a

The piece opens with a slow, almost mock-serious introduction before the actual tune arrives: a bouncy, singsong theme borrowed from a popular comic opera, played first plainly by the trio of violin, cello and piano so your ear can memorize it.

Each of the ten variations that follow puts the same tune through a different costume. Some speed it up into a scramble of notes, some slow it down and turn it tender, some hand the melody between instruments like a game of catch, and some hide it inside busy piano figuration so you have to listen for its outline underneath.

Listen for a variation where the cello suddenly gets the spotlight with a singing line, and another where the music turns unexpectedly minor and serious, a brief cloud passing over the comedy. Near the end, a slow variation marked Adagio pulls the tempo way back, as if the piece is catching its breath before the joke resumes.

The finale bursts back into fast tempo, tosses the tune around energetically among all three players, and closes with a quick, cheerful flourish, a wink at the audience that the whole thing was really just a very elaborate joke on a silly little tune.

Beethoven wrote these variations around 1816, basing them on a tune from Wenzel Müller's popular Viennese comic opera Die Schwestern von Prag, in which a character sings "Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu" ("I am the tailor Kakadu"). The opera itself was lighthearted, and Beethoven's choice of such an unassuming little tune for a full set of variations is itself a kind of joke, since he was by then known for far weightier works. The piece was published in 1824 as Op. 121a, late enough in Beethoven's output that some scholars believe he revised or completed it years after first sketching it. It has never been counted among Beethoven's serious statements, but chamber musicians and audiences have long enjoyed it as an example of his lighter, more good-humored side.