Bach is the musical love of my life. I cannot go more than a couple of days without playing his works. For me, Bach’s music does not belong to a bygone era, it belongs to the here and now. That’s one of the reasons he fascinates every new generation of musicians – because of how inherently open this music is to new ideas, styles and emotions. His music always reflects the world it finds itself in, past, present and future.
I write this as I embark on a most extraordinary year – by any standards – but particularly by those of a classical musician. I am playing one single work, the Goldberg Variations, 88 times in concert halls on six continents. Usually I have a much bigger mix of orchestra concerts, solo recitals and occasionally chamber music, but this is my year away from the big orchestras and conductors – it’s my year with Bach.
The Goldberg Variations are like an encyclopedia of how to think and dream on the piano. When they were written, they were probably almost unplayable for the majority of musicians. One could argue that they remain quite unplayable today. Once those deceptively facile opening notes have been struck, there really is no place to hide – you must carry on to the end, through 75 minutes of the most wildly virtuosic keyboard music ever written. And not just that – you must somehow bring to life some of the most astonishingly brilliant uses of counterpoint in the repertoire as well as countless instances of exalted poetry, abstract contemplation and deep pathos. How could this seem anything but impossible?
And yet, despite all its exacting demands, the depth and scope of the work grants the performer a wonderful freedom of expression. One often plays the Goldberg Variations very differently from one performance to the next, and to play the whole piece 88 times feels almost like a religious pilgrimage, or a conceptual work of art.
I recorded the variations in April and I have never put so much time into preparing for a recording session and trying to push myself to the limit – and beyond if possible. Because that seems to me to be what Bach is asking of us.
In 30 variations, built on the humble harmonic framework of a simple, graceful aria that is played at the work’s opening and closing, Bach turns limited material into boundless variety like no one before or since. The one thing that rivals Bach’s complete intellectual mastery of his craft is his inspired, creative playfulness. When we play and listen to the Goldberg Variations, we are also in the company of Bach the cheerful, at times ecstatic, master improviser, the greatest keyboard virtuoso of his time.
I have dreamed of recording the Goldberg Variations for 25 years. As with some of Bach’s other works on this scale, I was inclined to think of the work as a grand, commanding cathedral of music, magnificent in its structure and intricate in its ornamentation. But now I find another metaphor more apt: that of a grand oak tree, no less magnificent, but somehow organic, living and vibrant, its forms both responsive and regenerative, its leaves constantly unfurling to produce musical oxygen for its admirers through some metaphysical, time-bending photosynthesis. Or, in the rather more down-to-earth terms that Bach himself used to describe his variations on the title page of the original 1741 edition, they truly are a work “composed for music-lovers to refresh their spirits”.
The Goldberg Variations were published in 1741, at the end of a 10-year period during which Bach had composed some of his most formidable keyboard works. Their famous – and contested – origin story we owe to Forkel, who, in his 1802 biography of Bach, relates that the work was composed on a commission from the Russian diplomat-nobleman Count Hermann Karl von Keyserling. The count wanted music of a “somewhat lively character” to while away his sleepless nights.
This story contains a truth of the mythological kind, if not the historical. For what music could possibly be better suited to warding off the solitary despair of insomnia (or, by extension, that of human existence itself) than the Goldberg Variations, with their constant interplay of reassuring regularity and exhilarating novelty? Far from lulling anyone to sleep, this is a work very much capable of bringing the suffering insomniac to accept his wakefulness – even cherish it.
Another delightful quirk in this story – and indeed one of the reasons why its veracity is doubted – is that it is not the name of Count Keyserling that has stuck to the piece, as would have been expected, especially given his alleged handsome payment of a golden goblet filled with a hundred French gold coins (items which, although worthy of the adventures of the brothers Grimm, were not found in the Bach estate after the composer’s death). Rather, the work bears the name of Keyserling’s resident harpsichordist, the 14-year-old Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, whose equally sleepless nights were spent playing the variations for his master from an adjoining room. It is hard not to feel a certain kinship with young Goldberg, a brilliant pupil of Bach himself, and indeed to feel thankful for a title that reads like a prescient nod to all the musicians that have since made the piece their own whether or not they, too, have lost sleep over it.
Because making the work our own is the enduring and unique challenge of the Goldberg Variations. In a work “not of an age, but for all time,” to borrow Ben Jonson’s words on Shakespeare, we performers must somehow feel like we have taken part in its creation, that we have reinvented it in some way for our contemporaries. It truly is a performer’s work if there ever was one, and as such, the title fits perfectly.
Playing the Goldberg Variations for a live audience is always a great joy, but making a recording of the work presents a different kind of pressure. For a while, I thought I had to meet its formal perfection through mathematical means, measuring out tempo markings on the metronome for every variation in search of the ideal proportions and predetermining as many elements of the interpretation as possible, from the infinite dynamic shifts and inflections within the polyphony to the articulation of more or less every phrase. In practice, however, this all fell completely flat. Because, for all their formal consistency, the Goldberg Variations are not a predictable work of music. None of the endless questions of interpretation posed in Bach’s famously instruction-free notation can be resolved on some kind of autopilot, no matter how well-founded in research. Instead, the work beckons a kind of interpretative improvisation.
Like the laws of physics that govern the universe, the work’s formal substructures – impressive and effective as they are – act mostly in the background.
The way in which every successive variation grows out of the previous one is profoundly logical to the point of feeling inevitable, in the same way as autumn follows summer and winter dissolves into spring. But at least to me, the Goldberg Variations’ genius lies not in the general, but the specific. As each variation unfolds, one must be wholly gripped by its individual drama and affect, drawn into its own marvellous little microcosm and filled with the joy of discovering it. And with every time I perform the variations as a whole, I discover something new.
• Víkingur Ólafsson’s recording of the Goldberg Variations is released on Deutsche Grammophon on 6 October. He next performs the work in Frankfurt on 9 October, Hamburg (10th) and Köln (11th) and the world tour continues until June 2024. The performance on 15 December in Seoul will be live on Stage+.
