Johann Sebastian Bach: Goldberg Variations

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JS BACH: GOLDBERG VARIATIONS BWV 988
Thoughts on the work and interpretation

Whether string trio, harpsichord or piano - the Goldberg Variations cannot be captured with terms such as "style of interpretation" or "faithfulness to the original". As is well known, the character and value of an interpretation depend only to a very limited extent on the question of "according to style" or the "timbre" of the chosen instruments, even though critics and sometimes also musicologists like to delight in quantifiable and ultimately easily comprehensible parameters of such terms .

Questions of neither notated nor notable articulation subtleties, the inner phrasing of individual tones or larger groups of tones, for example, the choice of tempo and the inner »rubato« with its typical »inégal«, the use of specific playing techniques and ultimately the artistic imagination of the interpreters always update the teaching of law and bad – admittedly not in the sense of a scientific argument, but very much in the sense and for the purpose of that "mental excitement" which JS Bach wrote when he published his Clavier Exercise, consisting of an aria with various changes in front of the clavicimbal with 2 manuals, which Enthusiasts may have had in mind made for emotional excitement.

The topicality of Bach's monumental example of baroque variation art is not least guaranteed by the curiosity of the performers, who want to get to the bottom of his secrets again and again. The Goldberg Variations had already been recorded around fifty times in 1985, i.e. at the time the first transcription for string trio by Dmitry Sitkovetsky was published, although most of the recordings were already out of print or no longer available.

In Wolfgang Schreiber's revealing discographic survey from 1985 he had only nineteen recordings left, with the vast majority of performers at the time having given the harpsichord a preference in the ratio of 3:2. In contrast to the Art of Fugue, for example, Bach had clearly conceived the work for a two-manual harpsichord. Since the 1728s, the relationship between harpsichord players and their instruments began to change significantly: Old original harpsichords were played more frequently, e. B. by Christian Zell (instrument 1642, on the harpsichord: Alan Curtis) and Hans Ruckers (instrument XNUMX, on the harpsichord: Christiane Jaccottet), or modern, historical instruments such as by William Dowd (on the harpsichord: Gustav Leonhardt).

The greatest conceivable resonance of all recordings, however, found the two musically and pianistically sovereign, even congenial recordings by the Canadian Glenn Gould from the years 1955 and 1981, played on the modern concert grand piano. No wonder then that Sitkovetsky composed his transcription for string trio »in memoriam Glenn Gould«, so to speak, and as a tribute to the celebrations of Bach's 300th birthday. Even if the significance of Gould's recordings has long since been put into perspective by some of the more recent recordings, some of which are spectacular, they have nevertheless been stylized as the epitome of a general claim to artistic perfection, against which the ordinary mortal artist must fatefully be smashed to pieces.

Such existential fatalism of artistic existence found literary expression in the form of Thomas Bernhard's novel Der Untergeher, which makes two pianists despair of Gould's »Perfection« and unfolds an ambivalent, tragically ironic meditation on genius, madness, despair, illness, misfortune and the question whether it is even desirable to be an artistic genius. That remains unanswered here, as does the question of how the Goldberg Variations came about, which musicologists are still puzzling about today. The experts do not even agree on the theme (aria), whether it really came from Bach himself.

What is certain is that this theme can be found in the form of a sarabande in the second Clavierbüchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach from 1725, and that the first eight bass notes of the aria correspond to those of the Chaconne avec 62 variations by George Frideric Handel, published in 1733 was published are identical. But who is supposed to have inspired whom and what is, at least until today, speculation. The much-cited description in Johann Nikolaus Forkel's Bach biography, according to which the client was supposed to have been the Russian envoy at the Electoral Saxon court in Dresden, Count Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk, definitely belongs in the realm of anecdotes - if not fables.

According to unverifiable information from two Bach sons, Bach suffered from insomnia and therefore, for the purpose of amusement, ordered some piano pieces “so gentle and somewhat lively in character” from father Bach, which his court harpsichordist and student of Bach, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, performed for him at night should. This thoroughly romantic awareness of art, according to which music becomes a miracle cure, which is able to heal or at least alleviate the romantic illness, which consists in mourning for lost happiness or in the vain search for it, probably appealed to the taste of Forkel's romantic- Biedermeier audiences, however, can hardly be reconciled with the artistic awareness of Bach and his time: For Bach, music was a human way of praising God in the first instance, also of glorifying the secular sovereign and finally the spiritual or non- to serve the spiritual edification of the practicing as well as the receptive listener. Since the score contains no official dedication to Count Keyserlingk and, moreover, there is no other source for Forkel's version of the genesis, this story is now hardly taken seriously.

Structural analyzes of the work itself therefore appear far more meaningful, which once again bring to light an exuberant wealth of dramaturgical qualities, stylistic refinement and mathematically formal constructive complexities that there would never be enough space to list here - let alone interpret them. However, it is precisely the interpretation with a string trio that allows these complex structures, as well as the already largely three-part texture of the work, to come into their own in a highly sculptural manner and thus enables analytical, sensual listening without having to forego a harmonizing, homogeneous sound. Based on Sitkovetsky's transcription, additional elements of the new Bärenreiter Urtext Bach edition were incorporated into the present recording.

The extremely sparing use of vibrato and the use of three rare historical original instruments by Jacobus Stainer in the old tuning not only serve a new sound quality in the sense of a first interpretation approach in the history of interpretation of this masterpiece, but also convey through sharpened dissonance frictions as well as the pure nakedness and purity of the baroque tone and its harmonic network that composed and timeless modernity in Bach's oeuvre, which is only able to radiate that divine harmony through a perfect and unadorned transparency of the texture, which Bach always had in mind and which should serve the true "lovers for emotional excitement".

Jürg Dähler EMAA
Executive Masters in Arts Administration University of Zurich

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