Program Notes: The Complete Goldberg Variations

Johann Sebastian Bach, more than any great composer, was given to recasting his compositions in different forms. Throughout his career, he transcribed choral pieces for organ, string or woodwind parts for secular, harpsichord music to serve as church cantatas. Later musicians have long followed suit, arranging Bach’s works for modern instruments or ensembles. As a result, we often encounter Bach’s compositions in new formats, though the music may still be recognizable from previous hearings. 

Such is the case with the two works by Bach on this evening’s program. The first is an alternative version Bach himself made of a duo-sonata, the second an arrangement of a keyboard composition fashioned by a musician of our own time. But we start with a recent piece by a contemporary composer. 

American composer Damien Geter serves as Artistic Advisor to both Portland’s Resonance Ensemble and Portland Opera. He’s also a Grammy-winning operatic bass. His Buh-roke for harpsichord and strings was commissioned by Resonance Ensemble and premiered in 2021. Inspired by Bach’s harpsichord concertos, it combines elements of Baroque music with various styles of music from the Black diaspora. From Geter: “As you may have guessed, Buh-roke is a modern nod to the Baroque era. Featuring the harpsichord (one of my favorite instruments), the piece borrows techniques from that time, but with a funky twist. Buh-roke loosely explores the technique of fortspinnung, a characteristic of Baroque music that gives the piece a sense of direction. A minuet meets the listener in the contrasting section as throwback to the stylized dance, which appeared in many suites and early Classical symphonies. The piece ends as it begins (‘ABA’), which resembles the form of the da capo aria.” 

Bach’s chamber music includes three sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. The former instrument was, during Bach’s time, a late survivor of the viol family, which had flourished during the Renaissance. But it was largely supplanted during the 17th century by the newer and more sonorous violin and its siblings, the viola, cello and string bass. 
 
Like Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord, the viola da gamba sonatas represent a remarkable advance over the usual duo-sonata style of the Baroque era. That style featured a two-part texture polarized around a treble melody and an active bass line, the “basso continuo.” Simply stated, the latter provided a strong bass voice, with skeletal harmonies filled in on a harpsichord, usually in an ad libitum fashion. But Bach’s sonatas for viola da gamba entail a “through-composed” keyboard part, one in which the right hand plays an essential role stating melodic ideas. Thus liberated from the relatively circumscribed task of filling in chordal harmonies, the upper register of the keyboard instrument could participate in lively contrapuntal dialogue with the viola da gamba. The resulting texture is that of the typical Baroque-period trio sonata: two treble lines supported by a melodic bass, the three parts giving abundant possibilities for contrapuntal invention.  
 
Indeed, Bach wrote an alternative version of one of his viola da gamba sonatas, Sonata No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1027, casting it as a trio sonata, the form in which we hear it this evening. The piece unfolds in four movements that are arranged in a slow-fast-slow-fast pattern. This was the traditional design of the sonata da chiesa, or church sonata, a genre widely cultivated in Italy during the 17th century but preserved by German composers through the end of the Baroque era. In each movement, the two treble-line instruments entwine their voices in echoic counterpart, a hallmark of Bach’s music. The bass line, here supplied by cello, provides firm harmonic support and direction. 

Bach’s “Air and Thirty Variations,” better known as the Goldberg Variations, is one of its author’s most impressive achievements and, arguably, the summit of his copious output of keyboard music. It also represents the outstanding instance of Bach’s tendency to base wide-ranging compositional invention on a single and apparently modest musical premise. Briefly, the work presents a series of extraordinarily varied and inventive pieces, each built on the harmonic scaffold provided by a short keyboard piece.  

That generative piece, which Bach calls an aria, sounds at the start of the composition. Among its virtues is a very clear phrase and harmonic structure: two halves, in which the music progresses away from, and then back towards, the initial G major harmony. It is this design, rather than any of the aria’s melodic details, that Bach retains through the thirty 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 repeats verbatim. 
 
Collectively, the variations offer a wealth of figuration, textures and musical character. Several are cast as typical Baroque-period movements: a gigue; a fugue; a French Overture, replete with the sweeping scales and auspicious rhythms characteristic of that genre. Three of the movements change the tonality from major to minor, and the last of these proves unexpectedly poignant. Variation No. 30 quotes two popular songs. 
 
Moreover, the variations offer a remarkable display of contrapuntal ingenuity. Imitative counterpoint was Bach’s signature mode of musical thinking, and this pervades the Goldberg Variations to a great extent. The above-mentioned fugue is but one instance; other variations feature contrapuntal echoes of different sorts. This exhibition of “learned” compositional technique 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 rigors as an exalted form of play. The restrictions imposed by echoic counterpoint, no less than by the work’s immutable harmonic framework or the need for heterogeneous figuration and melodic ideas to offset this, inspired rather than daunted him. One senses that fashioning such severely constrained music was, for him, a wonderful game, and that the stricter the rules, the greater his enjoyment. 
 
The contrapuntal textures that prevail throughout the Goldberg Variations justify violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s arrangement of the work for violin, cello and piano. (Sitkovetsky has also transcribed the piece for string orchestra.) On the harpsichord, for which Bach wrote the Variations, or even the modern piano, on which the work is most often played today, the different melodic lines that make up the music’s fabric are not easily separated by the ear. With a greater variety of instrumental colors, their identities become clear. Bach, one suspects, would not be displeased by Sitkovetsky’s transcription.  

Paul Schiavo © 2023