Around 1820, Antonio Diabelli, an Austrian composer who had just recently entered the business of music publishing in Vienna and had hopes of making some real waves in the business, commissioned one of history's most fascinating sets of musical variations. He sent the same theme, a little waltz tune crafted by Diabelli himself, to fifty different composers, asking each to submit a singe variation to him. Such multi-composer efforts are not unknown in modern Western music—indeed, one such work, the so-called FAE Sonata written for violinist Joseph Joachim by his friends Schumann, Brahms, and Albert Dietrich ("FAE" refers to Joachim's personal motto, "Frei aber einsam"), is a favorite toy of musicologists—but Diabelli was probably the first and the last to try to put together so large and diverse an array of composers into one single piece of music. The composers responded in their own individual ways. After apparently ignoring Diabelli's request for several years, Beethoven submitted not one but thirty-three variations (now famous as the Diabell for piano, Op. 120). Franz Schubert, on the other hand, lost little time in tossing together his variation, a little thing in C minor that, in stark contrast to Beethoven's masterful Op. 120, remains an all-but-unknown treasure.

Schubert's Variation on a Waltz by Antonio Diabelli may be little-played; it is not, however, undeserving of pianists' attention. Diabelli's waltz-theme, famously described by Beethoven as "cobbler's patch," is in C major; Schubert reshaped it into C minor when he put his Variation to paper in May 1821. The binary form is exactly balanced: each half of the piece is 16 measures long (both are repeated in full and without any change of any kind, for a grand total of 64 bars of music). Occasionally a series of lusciously-scored suspensions emerges from a texture otherwise almost wholly devoted to single-line melody in the right hand and the usual kind of left-hand accompaniment—downbeat and then steady, quarter-note chords on the remaining beats (in this piece a strong downbeat is made only every other bar). The last cadence of each half of the Variation is approached via a brief passage of rich chordal homophony; the first cadence rounds things off in A flat major, the second time, naturally, takes things back home to C minor.

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