By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a winner of the Rubin Prize for Music Criticism.
We live in what has been called the age of the “infinite scroll”: the screens of digital culture continuously offer new information: more news, more posts, more videos, more opinions, all presented in an endless, formless parade. The attention economy splits our attention into ever-tinier parts—offering the tantalizing prospect of perpetual novelty, but often at the cost of introspective, sustained engagement. This season, Víkingur Ólafsson has embarked upon a performance model that offers an alternative to this modus operandi. He is devoting nearly an entire year’s worth of performances to a single work: Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Having recorded the piece in 2023, he is touring it across Europe, the United States, Asia, and South America, ultimately offering nearly one hundred live performances.
Bach is the ideal candidate for this depth of focus. His music—capacious in its quantity, monumental in its stature, precise in its architecture, marvelous in its beauty—is irresistible to completists. Ambitious soloists will take up the project of performing all his suites for cello, or all of his sonatas and partitas for violin, in one go. The German publisher Barenreiter offers a critical edition of all his compositions, which took more than five decades to produce and numbers more than one hundred volumes. The Netherlands Bach Society’s “All of Bach” project aims to make videos of each of his compositions available for free online to listeners around the world. Ólafsson’s project offers a related but distinct approach: rather than attempting to survey the entire of the composer’s output, he dives deep into one of Bach’s best-loved works, inviting listeners to join him in devoting their own full attention to a single—and singular—composition.
J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1741)
The Goldberg Variations were originally published with the simple title “Aria with diverse variations.” (Later, they became associated with the teenage harpsichord prodigy Johann Gottlieb Goldberg; a popular but apocryphal story suggests that Bach wrote them at the behest of Goldberg’s employer, Count Keyserlingk, who wanted Goldberg to play gracious music for him when he had trouble sleeping.) The opening aria unfolds over a bass line of thirty-two bars in length; the work as a whole has a corresponding thirty-two parts, consisting of the aria, thirty variations, and a closing restatement of the aria. Scholars differ on how to interpret the organization the variations: some hear a perfectly symmetrical structure of two sets of fifteen variations; others hear three sets of ten; and still others hear ten sets of three, each of which concludes with a canon. Regardless of which model one prefers, though, it is clear that on the level of structure, the piece is about as conceptually distant from the entropy of the “infinite scroll” as one can get. Given its impeccably organized yet patently complex design, it has been likened to an encyclopedia, a Rubik’s Cube, and even the “Martha Stewart of Variations.”
Bach’s aria is both warm and regal. Evoking a sarabande in its melodic emphasis on the second beat of each bar, it is restrained at first, with a repeated descending gesture that adds a slight melancholy to its generally amiable tone. The second half of the aria flows more easily, with additional sixteenth notes filling in each beat of the bar.
It is not the melody of this aria, but rather its bass line, which is the foundation of the variations that follow. First, Bach offers two dances: the first in a bounding triple meter, the second in a more stately duple meter. The third variation is a canon which stages a cordial, almost playful conversation among its voices. The next two variations shift the focus away from melody and toward the immense breadth of sonic effects that a virtuosic performer can convey on the keyboard; the next canon comes almost as a respite from the busy vibrancy of its predecessors.
Variation 7, a lilting piece in 6/8 time, features elegant dotted rhythms and elaborate ornamentation. It is followed by two more cerebral pieces, neatly structured and somewhat more reserved in affect. In Variation 10, Bach reminds us of his mastery of the fugue with a classic, compact example of the form. It is followed by two more expressive variations, whose winding, stepwise melodies pile atop one another with increasing complexity. Variation 13 returns to the sarabande-like serenity of the opening aria, albeit with far more ornamentation in its intricate melodic line. The galloping energy of the next variation ushers in Variation 15, a solemn, expansive meditation which signals that we have reached the halfway point of the work as a whole.
After the diaphanous conclusion of the fifteenth variation, the second half of the Goldbergs begins, appropriately, with a variation styled as an overture, bringing us back down to earth. The next several variations bustle with energy: each is entirely distinct in style and affect, but they share the qualities of concision and vivacity. But when we reach Variation 21, we are in for a shock: there is an abrupt shift to a minor key, and snaking chromatic harmonies inch us farther and farther afield from the piece’s governing bass line. Order is restored in Variation 22, by way of rigorous four-part writing. The next two variations are a study in contrast: first unbridled joy and momentum, then understated elegance.
No doubt the most admired of the entire set is Variation 25, known as the “Black Pearl.” Nearly five times as long as many of the other variations, it marks another rare return to minor, and evinces a quality of rhapsodic introspection, with large intervals stretching upward like unanswered questions. The next variation is more assured, but then there is a return to ambiguity, with Variation 27 offering a canon that seems to abandon the bass line entirely. Next is a study in contrasts: first a variation abuzz with trills, then another replete with chords and arpeggios. For his final variation, Bach offers a quodlibet, or medley of popular melodies—as if signaling that we are about to leave the self-sustaining world of this piece and return to our quotidian lives.
But first, he lets us stay just a bit longer, for a final restatement of the aria. It is unchanged, but it is impossible not to listen to it differently after having born witness to the incredible transformations that have emerged from its bass line. Closing the circle, Bach signals that his work is finished, and we can now turn our energies elsewhere. Sustained attention to this music becomes a form of sustenance: at the conclusion of the piece, the listener is left with a feeling of fullness and nourishment, a sense of true completion.
