In a very quiet setting I am listening this morning the the “Goldberg Variations” by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Many stories have been written over the past hundreds of years about this composition. Not all these stories appear to be true. Still the MUSIC is amazing and fascinating. Read on…
Around 1741, Bach published a long and complicated keyboard piece, calling it Aria with diverse variations for a harpsichord with two manuals (keyboards).
The music is constructed symmetrically, beginning with a beautifully tranquil Aria, the bass line of which leads to the 30 variations that follow. There is something of a dividing line after variation 15, and the piece ends as it begins, with the return of the Aria.
Every third variation is a canon — the melody of each is laid over itself, as in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” — with the additional complication that the pitch difference between the melodies rises from a canon in unison up to the canon in ninths.
Legend has it that Bach wrote the music to soothe the sleepless nights of one Count Kaiserling, who asked his private harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, to perform the variations. This may not be true, because when Bach wrote these variations, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg was 13 years of age.
We can forget these stories and listen to the music. Here is the way that Andras Schiff plays this amazing music:
