”Count Kayserling, formerly Russian Ambassador at the Court of the
Elector of Saxony, who frequently resided in Leipzig…once said t Bach
that he should like to have some clavier pieces for his [court
harpsichordist] Goldberg, which should be of such a soft and somewhat
lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his
sleepless nights. Bach thought he could best fulfil this wish by
variations, which, on account of the constant sameness of the
fundamental harmony, he had hitherto considered as an ungrateful task.
But as at this time all his works were models of art, these variations
also became such under his hand…Bach was, perhaps, never so well
rewarded for any work as for this: the Count made him a present of a
golden goblet, filled with a hundred Louis d’or. But their worth as a
work of art would not have been paid if the present had been a thousand
times as great.”
So wrote Sebastian Bach’s first biographer J.N. Forkel in his brief
account of the master’s life (1802). Whether a story with such fantastic
overtones (the hundred gold coins, an insomniac Count) is true is,
however, irrelevant when compared to the very legendary quality of this
music itself. Even when compared to the whole of Bach’s considerable and
varied output, the ‘Goldberg’ Variations stand out as an example of
their creator’s total compositional originality. In conceiving such a
work, Bach had no discernible models as regards the Goldbergs’
larger-scale architectonics or the exploitation of innovations in
keyboard technique and figuration. Desirous as every listener and
melamine is of surrendering oneself to the sheer aural beauty of this
music – after all, Bach’s own title page specifically states his work to
be ”prepared for the soul’s delight” (Gemueths-Ergetzung) – any
listener of Bach’s music has a responsibility to familiarise himself
with the constructs and aims that drove Bach to commit this music to
posterity. We must not forget that while Bach was no academic, he was
certainly a thinking man. He confronted his spiritual and intellectual
questions, stated his vision of the universe, and perhaps even grappled
with the joys and disappointments of his life through the medium of the
written note.
The Goldberg Variations are amongst the mere handful of works written
in any time or place that truly require a sort of road-map for the
listener. Unlike, say, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Handel (op. 31),
the successive movements of Bach’s work are not considered solely in
terms of ”musical-emotional cause and effect” (e.g., textural variety
for its own sake, meant to inspire solely visceral responses). Rather,
our Bach constructed these variations on a pre-conceived plan: most
obviously, the thirty variations are made up of ten groups of three, in
which a movement of what the scholar Peter Williams has called a
”clear-genre piece” (a dance, a fugue, an overture, an arioso, et al.)
is followed by a virtuoso piece featuring the crossing of the hands and
then by a canon. In turn, each successive canon is composed with
reference to successively rising intervals: Therefore, variation 3 is a
canon at the unison, whereas variation 6 is at the second, and so on and
so forth until variation 27, a canon at the ninth. As I will further
argue below, Bach’s plan may even have a narrative intent, which is
perhaps why variation 30 breaks the cycle of canons. Aesthetically
speaking, some of the variations seem even to be used as dramatic foils
to one another – hence, the bittersweet cantilena of variation 13 is
answered with the schizophrenic exuberance of variation 14, and the
question posed by the inconclusive ending of variation 15 is followed by
a stately overture in variation 16.
To say a brief word or two on matters of keyboard technique in Bach’s
work, it may the case – in spite of the usual tones of orthodox Bach
scholarship! – that Bach did not always work in a total inspirational
vacuum. Interestingly, only three years before Bach engraved and printed
his variations, 1738 saw the publication of a set of pieces famous for
introducing the world to hand-crossings and devilish keyboard
acrobatics: Domenico Scarlatti’s Essercizi. There are further
interesting parallels – for one, Scarlatti’s volume also contains thirty
movements. Who is to say that Bach would not have known of these
pieces? After all, he knew many a publication of music from the
libraries of his erudite friends and kinsmen, and even a subscription
list for the Paris printing of quartets by Telemann lists a ”M[onsieur]
Bach, de Leipsic.”
After considering but a few structural aspects of Bach’s work, we may
ask one final question. What drove Bach to compose such a work? Even if
the story of the insomniac Count is true, such legends can never really
explain a composer’s compulsion to actually say something as an artist
and creator. Personally, I venture to guess that the answer may be found
in Bach’s own life. What was happening around and perhaps a few years
before 1741?
Bach’s letters from the late 1730s show a man who felt persecuted and
misunderstood and who also suffered a great deal of personal pain. In a
series of letters from 1738, we see that Bach’s troubled son Johann
Gottfried Bernhard had skipped town from an important position as an
organist in Muehlhausen due to having accrued considerable debts. For
almost two years, J.S. Bach lost track of his son, who eventually died,
away from home, in Jena (of what? and how?) at the age of 24. He wrote
in one letter, desperate in trying to find his son: ”I must bear my
cross in patience, and leave my unruly son to God’s patience alone….”
Equally significant, I think, is a letter from the Leipzig Town Council,
dated 17 March 1739, pointing out to Bach that the performance of the
St. John Passion is to be cancelled because of not having been
officially approved by the Council. Bach’s understated and obviously
hurt reply cannot but inspire sadness in even the most hard-hearted
reader: ”he [Bach] answered:…he did not care, for he got nothing out of
it anyway, and it was only a burden.”
The effect of these and other tribulations was considerable – recent
scholarship on the Bach cantatas shows that by the late 1730s the
composer stopped regularly writing new cantatas and mostly resigned
himself to performances of works by other composers. Rather, in his last
decade, he turned inward and wrote his finest music in genres that had
mostly gone out of fashion or were musically and intellectually far
above the heads of his contemporaries: the Goldberg Variations (1741),
the Musical Offering (1747), and the Art of Fugue (1749-1750). No one
noticed – the Art of Fugue, for example, didn’t even sell enough copies
to pay for the copper plates used to engrave them – and he didn’t care.
As far as Bach was concerned, to paraphrase a remark made by Sir Thomas
More in Robert Bolt’s unforgettable ‘A Man for All Seasons,’ his
audience was himself and God – ”a pretty good public, that.”
The thirtieth variation
– the ”Quodlibet” – may have something to do
with this. According to various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
writers, the quodlibet was a genre defined by the simultaneous singing
of various popular tunes. According to Bach’s sons, Bach family members
would meet and sing quodlibets and ”laugh heartily” (Forkel). Being
variation 30, however, this piece should instead be a canon according to
the pattern set out in the rest of the work. But Bach decides to
conclude on a different note altogether, with the combination of these
tunes:
(a) Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewest
”I have been so long away from you”
(b) Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben
”Cabbage and beets have driven me away”
Perhaps these songs are allusion to jokes within the family. Or, in
considering Bach’s own life, could the first song in particular allude
to something deeper? Again, back to Bach and where he was in life in the
early 1740s: by this point, several of his children were dead, as were
his first wife, his parents (who both had died by the time he was ten
years of age), and his brothers; he lived in a town in which a group of
faceless councillors desultorily insulted or ignored his work, and in
most of Germany the name ”Bach” generally referred to one of his sons.
He probably still felt the stung of his being hired as the Cantor of the
Thomaskirche in 1723, when a councillor wrote that ”since a first or
second-rate candidate cannot be procured, we must settle for a mediocre
one.”
So what is the quodlibet about, then? In nine canons, we have climbed
the steps to perfection (9 = 3×3, 3 being the ”perfect” number of the
Trinity), and what is our reward in Heaven? We get to see our family.
Maybe Bach remembered a song from his childhood, or a joke told by his
brothers, or imagined – as adults – his children who died in infancy.
And the repetition of the aria at the end? Briefly allowed to see his
family in Paradise, our Bach wakes up. It was all a dream after all. In
this variation, I am forever reminded of an unforgettable song from the
great Johnny Cash:
“Daddy sang bass (Mama sang tenor)
Me and little brother would join right in there
Singin’ seems to help a troubled soul
One of these days and it won’t be long
I’ll rejoin them in a song
I’m gonna join the family circle at the throne….”
Academically, there is no proof of this narrative intent, but in my
mind, Bach’s music itself leaves no doubt of something deeper. We can
explain his music with all the charts and tables and numbers we want,
but that only explains how. If we are going to listen to Bach, play his music, and love him, then we have to answer this: why.
(Mahan Esfahani)
