J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations
Program notes
Bach’s Goldberg Variations is like spending an evening with a single, beautiful story that keeps returning in ever-fresh, astonishing disguises. At heart it is deeply human music: elegant, witty, profound, and moving, even if you know nothing about classical music. The whole piece begins with a serene, gently ornamented aria, a simple melody unfolding with calm grace over a repeating bass line, from which Bach spins out 30 variations so your ears feel both comforted by familiarity and thrilled by surprise, before the original aria returns like coming home after a long and wondrous journey.
Across roughly an hour, you pass through music that can sound like a lullaby, a dance, a playful game, and a quiet prayer, some variations sparkling with joyful energy while others slow time almost to a standstill, so the piece feels both incredibly ordered and completely free. Beneath this lies an intricate architecture—groups of three variations, every third one a progressively more complex canon—that fascinates musicians and scholars, yet none of that is required to enjoy the constantly shifting kaleidoscope of melody, rhythm, and character. Within this single work, Bach seems to fold in an entire musical universe, from tender song to majestic French overture, from rustic dance to near-mystical introspection, with rare minor-key shadows that make the prevailing radiance glow even more. Many listeners come away feeling they have lived a whole life in miniature—youth and play, sorrow and struggle, wisdom and serene acceptance—which is why performers return to it for a lifetime and why it has become a treasured work that soothes, challenges, and uplifts in a single, luminous arc.
Bach’s Goldberg Variations was composed around 1741, when he was working in Leipzig and near the height of his powers as a composer of keyboard music. It was published in 1741 or 1742 as the fourth and final part of his Clavier-Übung (“keyboard practice”) series, placing it alongside his most ambitious works for harpsichord. A famous (though probably apocryphal) story from Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, claims it was commissioned by Count Keyserlingk, the Russian ambassador in Dresden, to be played by his young harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg to soothe the count’s sleepless nights, which is how the piece acquired its nickname. In Bach’s own day, the work seems to have been admired but not widely performed, and after his death it fell into relative obscurity until the 19th and early 20th centuries, when interest in his music began to surge again. Its true leap into modern fame came in 1955 with Glenn Gould’s landmark recording on piano, which revealed the piece’s clarity, energy, and emotional range to a huge international audience and helped establish it as one of the supreme monuments of the keyboard repertoire.
Across roughly an hour, you pass through music that can sound like a lullaby, a dance, a playful game, and a quiet prayer, some variations sparkling with joyful energy while others slow time almost to a standstill, so the piece feels both incredibly ordered and completely free. Beneath this lies an intricate architecture—groups of three variations, every third one a progressively more complex canon—that fascinates musicians and scholars, yet none of that is required to enjoy the constantly shifting kaleidoscope of melody, rhythm, and character. Within this single work, Bach seems to fold in an entire musical universe, from tender song to majestic French overture, from rustic dance to near-mystical introspection, with rare minor-key shadows that make the prevailing radiance glow even more. Many listeners come away feeling they have lived a whole life in miniature—youth and play, sorrow and struggle, wisdom and serene acceptance—which is why performers return to it for a lifetime and why it has become a treasured work that soothes, challenges, and uplifts in a single, luminous arc.
Bach’s Goldberg Variations was composed around 1741, when he was working in Leipzig and near the height of his powers as a composer of keyboard music. It was published in 1741 or 1742 as the fourth and final part of his Clavier-Übung (“keyboard practice”) series, placing it alongside his most ambitious works for harpsichord. A famous (though probably apocryphal) story from Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, claims it was commissioned by Count Keyserlingk, the Russian ambassador in Dresden, to be played by his young harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg to soothe the count’s sleepless nights, which is how the piece acquired its nickname. In Bach’s own day, the work seems to have been admired but not widely performed, and after his death it fell into relative obscurity until the 19th and early 20th centuries, when interest in his music began to surge again. Its true leap into modern fame came in 1955 with Glenn Gould’s landmark recording on piano, which revealed the piece’s clarity, energy, and emotional range to a huge international audience and helped establish it as one of the supreme monuments of the keyboard repertoire.
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