The fourth part of Bach’s elaborate Clavierübung, better known as the Goldberg Variations (1741), is, as many of Bach’s larger works, well appreciated by both music lovers and academic music researchers. Bach had the special talent of being able to employ mathematical and structural means for an emotional plea, a skill he shares with very little composers in the history of music. The emotional plea is here however not filled with high-flown drama; rather, it is a game on the human perception of music. The Goldberg Variations form a collection of 32 pieces, founded on a 32-bar bass line which is used in all variations. The different parts vary in character: short and passionate, short and light-footed, long and melancholy etc, but the whole set does radiate a sense of light joy and playfulness. The piece ends in the way it began: with the aria.

The present popularity of the Goldberg Variations can possibly be explained by the fact that this piece does not make use of variations on a theme, which is common, but of variations on a bass line. This can be compared with the variation tradition in pop and jazz music. There is in fact question of a range of pieces based on a chord scheme. Bach himself found the variation form in general (and therefore the theme & variations too) unsatisfactory and unrewarding. For that reason, he never got beyond one variation piece – but a piece that three centuries later still proudly embodies the perfect example of variation technique. What should further be mentioned about the form, is that the middle of the piece is marked by an overture in the French style and that each segment of three variations ends in a canon (with a literal repetition of the melody, as in Brother John), of which the second voice starts one tone higher each time. In the first canon, this voice therefore starts on the same tone as the first voice; in the second canon it starts a tone higher, in the third canon two tones higher, et cetera. Where one expects the final canon (variation 30), Bach places, as if to stress the light-footedness of the whole, the famous Quodlibet, a potpourri of then well-known folksongs (comparable to our Itsy Bitsy Spider and Candle in the Wind), which must surely have curled the lips of the listeners into a smile.

There have been a lot of speculations on the lightness of the Goldberg Variations. Bach had (according to his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach) written the piece for Count von

Kayserlinck’s personal harpsichordist, a young man named Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756). For a short period of time, Bach was the teacher of this Mr Goldberg, who regularly stayed in Bach’s place of residence, Leipzig, together with Von Kayserlinck’s household. The count suffered from several diseases and was an insomniac. He sought relief during the nights by asking Goldberg to play the harpsichord in the adjoining room. The story goes that Von Kayserlinck assigned Bach to compose pain relieving and calming music for these specific, but very frequent occasions. Whether Bach’s Variations actually had the relieving effect on the pains of the grateful count (he later continuously referred to the variations as “my variations”) can only be guessed, but certainly not all of them are calming. On the contrary: the virtuosity of some of the variations is so far beyond the technical achievements of those days, that many have wondered whether a boy of no more than fourteen years of age could, even under the supervision of a mentor such as Bach, have been able to play even part of the variations. It is however possible that the more virtuoso parts still had a calming effect – due to Goldberg’s playing.

Raaf Hekkema 2011