Program Notes: Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson

By Paul Schiavo

This recital by Víkingur Ólafsson finds the star pianist — famed for his visionary interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach and once called “Iceland’s Glenn Gould” by The New York Times — applying his stunning style to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. This concert follows the release of his 2023 recording featuring the monumental work, which he’s devoting his entire 2023/2024 season to performing — a total of 88 times in concert halls on six continents!   

How J. S. Bach came to compose his “Air and Thirty Variations,” better known as the Goldberg Variations, forms the subject of one of the more colorful anecdotes concerning the composer. This story comes to us through Johann Forkel, Bach’s earliest biographer. Forkel relates that the Variations were commissioned by one Count Hermann Keyserlingk, a diplomat living in Dresden but formerly a resident of Leipzig, where Bach was active after 1723. The Count was well acquainted with Bach’s abilities and, in probably the late-1730s, sent a talented young harpsichordist in his employ to Bach for advanced study.   

This aspiring musician was Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who evidently achieved on his instrument exceptional proficiency at an early age. His duties to Count Keyserlingk were what one might expect: to play for his patron and various guests on social occasions. But the Count also required music in a more intimate setting and this bears directly on how the Goldberg Variations supposedly came to be written. Let us pick up Forkel’s narrative: 

The Count was often sickly, and then had sleepless nights. At these times Goldberg ... had to pass the night in an adjoining room to play something to him when he could not sleep. The Count once said to Bach that he should like to have some keyboard pieces for his Goldberg, which should be of such ... character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights. Bach thought that he could best fulfill this wish by variations .... The Count thereafter called them nothing but his variations. He was never weary of hearing them; and for a long time, when the sleepless nights came, he used to say: “Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations.” Bach was, perhaps, never so well rewarded for any work as for this: the Count made him a present of a golden goblet filled with a hundred Louis d’ors. 

Charming as it is, we have no corroborating evidence to lend credence to this story. The music certainly offers no indication that it was conceived as a palliative for Herr Keyserlingk’s insomnia. Much of it is vigorous in character and hardly suitable for inducing slumber, and it is doubtful that Bach had any interest in what is today called “music therapy.” But what did interest him, vitally and over the whole of his career, was the thorough and orderly exploration of certain musical challenges and the arrangement of his solutions into large-scale, logical, aesthetically satisfying formal designs. We find this in the comprehensive examination of tonality and echoic counterpoint that makes up The Well-Tempered Clavier; in the extensive contrapuntal treatment of Frederick of Prussia’s “royal theme” in The Musical Offering; and in the compendium of fugal technique undertaken in The Art of the Fugue. With its extended discourse on a single musical premise — the harmonic skeleton of a brief keyboard aria — the Goldberg Variations is very much the peer of those works. 

The “subject melody” of the Goldberg Variations is a modest piece, titled “Aria,” heard at the outset of the work. Among its virtues is a clear harmonic outline, and it is this, rather than any of the aria’s melodic features, that Bach retains through the 30 variations that follow. Indeed, we hear nothing like the melody that launches the Goldberg Variations until the very end of the work, when the aria returns unaltered. 

The variations offer a wealth of figuration, textures and musical character, and none repeats what another has said. Several are cast as typical Baroque-period movements. Among these are a gigue (Variation 7); a four-voice fugue (Variation 10); a French overture, replete with the sweeping scales and auspicious rhythms characteristic of that genre (Variation 16, which, significantly, begins the second half of the composition); and a toccata featuring chords played in rapid alternation (Variation 29). Three of the movements — Variations 15, 21 and 25 — change the prevailing tonality from major to minor, the last of these proving unexpectedly poignant. Variation 30, “Quodlibet,” quotes two folksongs popular in Bach’s time. 

Even more notable than these different “character pieces” is the display of contrapuntal ingenuity Bach offers. Echoic counterpoint pervades the Goldberg Variations to an extraordinary extent. The above-mentioned fugue is but one instance of this. Beginning with Variation 3, Bach constructs every third movement as a strict two-voice canon and in each, the second voice follows the first at a progressively different scale degree. In strictly following this scheme, Bach set himself a compositional problem of exceptional complexity, and one cannot imagine any other composer solving it so successfully. 

All this might seem merely erudite were it not carried off so convincingly and with such virtuosity. Of the many wonders encountered in the Goldberg Variations, the greatest may be that Bach seems to treat its compositional demands as an exalted form of play. The restrictions dictated by self-imposed contrapuntal rigor, no less than by the variations’ immutable harmonic framework and the need for diverse figuration and melodic ideas to offset this, evidently inspire rather than daunt him. One senses that fashioning such severely constrained music is for him a wonderful game — and that the stricter the rules, the greater his enjoyment. 

There is a lovely irony in this. The Goldberg Variations entails musical thought of self-evident brilliance, but it wears its learning lightly, the sheer delight that evidently attended its creation shining through all the compositional intricacies. The “Quodlibet,” with its winking quotations of popular songs, erases any doubt about this matter by concluding the variations on a humorous note — though, of course, the humor results from yet another instance of contrapuntal artistry. It is possible to hear a touch of levity even in the return of the aria after all its elaborate reconstructions have paraded before us. Listening to it at the work’s conclusion, one can imagine Bach smiling at our amazement as the unassuming aria reminds us that it was from so little he made so much. 

Notes originally published © 2022, updated 2024