Frustrated at my inability to "get" this reknowned work by Beethoven, who is definitely among my very favorite composers, I have been listening to it over and over again. And I think I am starting to crack through. Instead of listening all the way through, I play the Diabelli waltz theme and then go to one (or a small group) of the variations and play them through a few times. (The car CD player is good for switching trackes this way.) In addition to simply enjoying the music more, I find I am able to pick out elements of the altered theme in many of the variations. Is there somewhere on the internet, or does someone have handy, a simple explanaition of the compositional technique used in each variation? I'm not as interested in the tempo indications, which are listed on the disc anyway, as I am in the ways Beethoven manipulates the thematic material and what I should be hearing in each variation. I don't have the score, but I am familiar enough with music vocabulary to follow what is going on. I am listening to Barenboim on Erato. Does anyone have favorite versions of the work with notably different interpretations? Ed