Johann Sebastian Bach
Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany
Died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig
In 1733, Bach went looking for a new job. His complaints about his decade-old post as music director of Leipzig’s churches were many and often sharply expressed to his employers: he was grossly overworked (he had, for example, been required to turn out one new cantata every week during his first two years); his relations with both church and civic leaders were often acrimonious (they had hoped to land the glamorous Georg Philip Telemann so Bach got the job by default, and they regularly threatened to cut his pay, finally doing so in 1729 — the year of the St. Matthew Passion ); he was always at odds with the local university faculty (they resented his lack of formal education and he mocked their pretension); his students at the church school where he taught music and Latin were, he claimed, unruly and bereft of talent.
On February 1, 1733, Friedrich August I, Prince Elector of Saxony, died, and Bach made a bid for the coveted position of Court Composer to his son and successor, Friedrich August II. Plans were immediately begun for the new Elector’s coronation in Dresden, and, as part of the celebrations, Friedrich was to receive the homage of the city of Leipzig in April. Bach composed grand new settings of the Kyrie and Gloria that would be appropriate for the occasion, and performed them on April 21, 1733 in the Thomaskirche. Three months later he sent a flowery letter of application and the score for the new Kyrie and Gloria — this “trifling example of my skill,” as he disparagingly called this music that served as the seed for the B minor Mass — to Friedrich in Dresden. He heard nothing about his request for the next three years (not least because the Elector was busy dealing with demonstrations in Poland against his rule), and he carried on with his duties in Leipzig.
It was not until November 1736 that Count Hermann Carl von Keyserling, the Russian ambassador to Saxony and an ardent admirer of the composer, convinced the Elector to give Bach at least an honorary position at the Dresden court. Such non-residential appointments were common at the time, and were not unlike the recognition given today, for example, to suppliers for the British royal houses, who are allowed to display a prestigious seal noting that they are a “Purveyor to the Crown.” Indeed, most of the appointments of Bach’s time were von Haus aus (“not part of the household”), and required that the composer supply such music as was demanded and that he attend at court if ordered. Bach had a fortunate run of such distinctions. When he took up his job in Leipzig, in 1723, he remained an honorary Kapellmeister to his previous employer, Prince Leopold of Cöthen. Upon Leopold’s death in 1728, Bach was awarded a similar position with the Duke of Weissenfels, which continued until 1736. His appointment as Hofkomponist — “Court Composer” — to Friedrich August II was the most prestigious of all these awards, and he paid his respects by giving a two-hour recital on the newly installed Silbermann organ in Dresden’s Frauenkirche on December 1, 1736.
The admiration of Count von Keyserling, instigator of the Dresden appointment, for Bach’s music had been fostered by Wilhelm Friedemann, Johann Sebastian’s eldest son, who had been appointed organist at the Dresden Sophienkirche in 1733. Having arranged for Friedrich August’s largesse in 1736, Keyserling remained a devoted patron of Bach, and often visited him in Leipzig. In 1741, he asked Bach if he would undertake the instruction of a promising fourteen-year-old organist and harpsichordist named Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, born in Danzig in 1727, whose study in Dresden with Wilhelm Friedemann the Count had been subsidizing. Bach agreed to accept Goldberg as a student, and the boy proved to be a talented musician. In 1751, he was appointed to the musical establishment of Count Heinrich Brühl in Dresden, and by the time of his premature death, in 1756, he had composed two concertos, 24 polonaises, and a sonata for harpsichord, a cantata, a motet, and several trio sonatas for flute, violin and continuo, including one (C major, BWV 1037) good enough to have been attributed to Bach himself for many years. It was the coming together of these three figures — Bach, Keyserling, and Goldberg — that spawned one of the most transcendent keyboard masterpieces ever written.
There are various theories concerning the origin of the Aria with Diverse Variations — the “Goldberg” Variations. The work was apparently composed in 1741, when Bach presented a manuscript copy to Keyserling at a dinner in Leipzig, perhaps in appreciation of the Count’s advocacy at the Dresden court, perhaps as a petition for further favors, perhaps as a commissioned piece for Goldberg. These practical — and highly likely — explanations, however, have always been overshadowed by the romantic one that Johann Nikolaus Forkel offered in his 1802 biography of Bach, the first full-length one ever written about the composer: “For this work, we have to thank the instigation of Count Keyserling, who often stopped in Leipzig and brought there with him the afore-mentioned Goldberg, in order to have him given musical instruction by Bach. The Count was often ill and had sleepless nights. At such times, Goldberg, who lived in his house, had to spend the night in an antechamber, so as to play for him during his insomnia. Once, the Count mentioned in Bach’s presence that he would like to have some clavier pieces for Goldberg, which should be of such a smooth and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights. Bach thought himself best able to fulfill this wish by means of Variations. Thereafter the Count always called them his variations. He never tired of them, and for a long time, sleepless nights meant: ‘Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations.’ Bach was perhaps never so well rewarded for one of his works as for this one. The Count presented him a golden goblet filled with 100 louis-d’or.
Nevertheless, even had the gift been a thousand times larger, their artistic worth would not yet be paid for.” Though the piece was known to Bach, and published by Balthasar Schmids in Nuremberg in 1742, as, simply, Aria with Diverse Variations for Harpsichord with Two Manuals, Forkel’s account has inscribed it forever into the musical consciousness as the “Goldberg” Variations.
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As the theme for his Variations, Bach borrowed a piece in the thoughtful style of a sarabande from the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena (his second wife), a collection of small vocal and instrumental numbers, many by Bach, some by other composers, used for the family’s household concerts. The theme is written there in Anna’s hand, and bears no title; Bach called it Aria when he adopted it for his Variations. As he did with the other peerless, career-summarizing monuments from his last decade — The Art of Fugue, the Musical Offering, the Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch” — Bach wove from this small thematic seed of two sixteen-measure strains a rich and varied universe of musical worlds. The Aria, pure and meditative, stands, like a portal, both before and after the thirty variations. The exact mid-point (Variation 16) is occupied by a majestic French Overture, with the first section of the theme rendered in grand, dotted rhythms, and the second as a fugue. Every third variation is a two-part canon — a piece in strict imitation, here with a third accompanying voice — that move successively upward through the available musical intervals, from unison and second to octave and ninth. The tenth variation is a Fughetta (i.e., “little fugue”), with methodical entries of the subject precisely every four measures. The thirtieth variation is a Quodlibet (literally, “what you please”), an ancient musical type in which popular melodies are incorporated into a polyphonic texture, a pastime that the Bachs extemporized at their family get-togethers. Bach here fitted two well-known ditties of the day — Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir g’west (“Long have I been away from you”) and Kraut und Rüben haben mir vertrieben (“Cabbage and turnips have put me to flight”) — upon the bass line of the theme. The other variations range from elegant to muscular, from brilliant to introspective, from lyrical to martial.
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In 1938, the distinguished harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick published his pioneering performing edition of the “Goldberg” Variations. He closed his extensive essays on the work’s history, interpretation, and expressive effect with the following cogent overview of its progress:
“However much it is an act of impudence thus to discuss something which is far too profound and complex to be grasped in words, it seems necessary to confess some of the feelings which inevitably come with the playing of this music.
“The Aria seems to foreshadow the spirit of the whole work through the tenderness and calm with which the solemnity of the fundamental bass is clothed at its initial appearance.
“The first variation stands like a festive gateway leading to the inner world exposed in the following three variations. These, like so many of the canons and the Aria, have an unearthly pure sweetness and a lyricism in every phrase that makes one long to dissolve one’s fingers, the instrument, and one’s whole self into three or four singing voices. For a moment, this quiet lyricism is interrupted by the shining smooth swiftness of the first arabesque variation. Then comes a second canon of an almost nostalgic tenderness; then a faraway scherzo of the utmost lightness and delicacy. The following arabesque and canon return to a lyricism which is interrupted by the brusque roughness of the Fughetta. This is followed by the delicate network of the third arabesque and the sunny canon at the fourth. Then comes a flute aria of a breathtaking quiet pure joy. The humor of the fourth arabesque makes even more striking the appearance of the dark tragic canon at the fifth which ends the first half of the variations.
“The second half opens with a majestic French Ouverture, followed by one of the lightest of the arabesque variations. In the sixth canon and the lute-variation, we return to a lyric sweetness like that of the beginning, but more peaceful. Another scherzo arabesque contrasts with the somber seventh canon, which in turn joins on to the alla breve variation. This, for all its quicker tempo, transforms the chromatic pathos of the canon into that kind of serene chastened joy which follows pain. In the seventh arabesque, we burst forth in the most unrestrained exuberant joy, which is tranquilized in the gentle rocking of the canon at the octave. Again we are interrupted to be carried to even greater tragic heights on the waves of a quiet yet irresistibly passionate aria. From the eighth arabesque on, the variations mount through a sprightly canon, glittering trills, and waltz-like bravura to the final jubilant climax in the Quodlibet, upon which the repetition of the Aria falls like a benediction.
“But for all their lyricism and tragic passion and exuberance, the Aria and the variations seem of a divine substance entirely refined and purified of anything personal or ignoble, so that in playing them one seems only the unworthy mouthpiece of a higher voice. And even beyond the scope of the emotions that have been aroused, the effect of the whole is one of boundless peace, in which one returns, cleansed, renewed, matured, to the starting point, which, seen a second time, seems so transfigured in the light of this traversed spiritual journey.”
©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda