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Goldberg Variations BWV 988
General Discussions - Part 9 (2012-2022) |
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Continue from Part 8 |
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BCW: Over 500 Goldbergs! |
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Aryeh Oron wrote (May 1, 2012):
The discography pages of the Goldberg Variations BWV 988 on the BCW have been revised & updated:
See: http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV988-Rec1.htm
The discography is arranged chronologically by recording date, a page per a decade.
With over 500 different recordings this is certainly Bach's most recorded solo keyboard work, although the discography includes also many arrangements.
If you have any correction, addition, etc., please inform me. |
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BCW: Goldberg Variations Discography once again |
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Aryeh Oron wrote (October 23, 2012):
Only half a year ago I had revised and updated the discography pages of the Goldberg Variations BWV 988 on the BCW, and I found myself having to update them once again. Almost 50 new recordings have been added since the last revision, most of them are naturally from the current decade, but there are also many discoveries from previous decades. The discography presents now 549 different recordings (every recordings is presented only once, including all its releases) of this Bach's most recorded solo keyboard work.
See the discography page of the current decade: http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV988-Rec8.htm
This page has inter-links to the pages of previous decades.
If you have any correction, addition, etc., please inform me. |
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BCW: Discographies of the Variations & Capriccios BWV 988-994 |
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Aryeh Oron wrote (August 29, 2013):
The discography pages of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations and the Arias & Variations, Capriccios on the BCW have been updated. The discographies are arranged chronologically by recording date, a page per a decade. The discography pages are inter-linked. You can start, for example, at the last decade page (2010-2019) and go backward to pages of previous decades.
Goldberg Variations BWV 988 (563 recordings of the complete work):
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV988-Rec8.htm
This is definitely the most recorded work among Bach's solo keyboard works. However, the discography includes not only recordings on keyboard instruments (harpsichord, clavichord, piano, organ, etc.) but also many arrangements for various combinations of instruments.
Arias & Variations, Capriccios BWV 989-994 (128 recordings of complete works):
http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV989-994-Rec8.htm
If you have any correction, addition or completion of missing details, please inform me.
With this group I have finished revising and updating all the BCW discography pages of Bach's solo keyboard works BWV 772-994. |
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BCW: Over 700 Goldbergs! |
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Aryeh Oron wrote (December 18, 2016):
The discography pages of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 on the BCW have been revised & updated. The discography is arranged chronologically by recording date. Currently there are 707 different recordings of the complete (or near complete) work. In the previous version of this discography from 3 years ago there were 563. All the releases of each recording are presented as one entry. Because the number of recordings is so big, I had to split the discography pages from 2000 onward to a page for every 5 years.
In order to make this discography as comprehensive as possible, I have compiled info from every possible source I could find, including web recording databases, web-stores, YouTube, SoundCloud, IMSLP, other Goldberg discographies, and more.
The discography pages are inter-linked. You can start, for example, in the most recent page (2015-2019): http://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV988-Rec2015.htm
and go backward to the page of previous 5 years (2010-2014).
With over 700 recordings, the Goldberg Variations is definitely the most recorded work among Bach’s solo keyboard works. However, the discography includes not only recordings on keyboard instruments (harpsichord, clavichord, piano, organ, etc.) but also many arrangements for various combinations of instruments.
If you have any correction, addition or completion of missing details, please inform me. |
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A friendship that grew out of the Goldberg Variations |
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Sneffels wrote (September 22, 2020):
A very sensitive, thoughtful, and quite lovely memoir of a friendship.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/opinion/ruth-bader-ginsburg-friendship.html
They met because of the Goldberg Variations. A great, profound Goldbergs, among my favorites, played live by Zhu Xiao Mei: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw4ZW6AYxeI
Digression: The article mentions the conductor Dean Dixon, who was one of the great conductors of his generation, and black -- he conducted major orchestras all over the world, but couldn't find work in the US. In the 1960s the Sydney Symphony was considering offering him their conductorship, and he flew to Sydney and spent a week there meeting people. Someone asked Dixon why he was considering this orchestra (now among the greats but then still improving). Dixon replied with two cogent musical reasons, and then said that it was the first time anywhere that he had never experienced racism.
(Of course, the aboriginals were still heavily suppressed then, and they didn't appear in or even get mentioned in Australian society. Quite likely Dixon never heard of their plight.) |
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Kim Patrick Clow wrote (September 24, 2020):
[To Neffels] Thank you so much for that link; very moving! |
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BCW: Over 1,000 Goldbergs! |
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Aryeh Oron wrote (December 29, 2020):
The discography pages of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 (GV) on the BCW have been revised & updated. The discography is arranged chronologically by recording date. Currently there are 1,047 different recordings of the complete (or near complete) work. In the previous version of this discography from 4 years ago there were 707. All the releases of each recording are presented as one entry.
In order to make this discography as comprehensive as possible, I have compiled info from every possible source I could find, including web recording databases, web-stores, YouTube, SoundCloud, IMSLP, artist websites, record label websites, other GV discographies, and more.
Because the number of recordings is so big, I had to split the discography into 28 pages:
- from 1900 to 1989, a page per decade
- from 1990 to 1999, a page per 5-year period
- from 2000 to 2020, a page per year.
For every performer of the GV I have created/updated Bach Discography and Biography pages, linked from the performer's entry in the GV Discography pages. So, if a performer has recorded the GV multiple times, you can find in his/her Discography page all these recordings as well as every other Bach's work he/she has recorded.
The discography pages are inter-linked. You can start, for example,
in the main page: https://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV988.htm and go forward;
or in most recent page (2020): https://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV988-Rec2020.htm and go backward.
With over 1,000 recordings, the GV is definitely the most recorded work among Bach’s solo keyboard works. However, the discography includes not only recordings on keyboard instruments (harpsichord, clavichord, piano, organ, accordion, etc.) but also many arrangements for various combinations of instruments.
If you have any correction, addition or completion of missing details, please inform me.
Happy New Year! |
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William L. Hoffman wrote (January 9, 2021):
Having just reviewed Aryeh's most recent accounting, https://www.bach-cantatas.com/NVD/BWV988-Rec2020.htm, I am impressed with the wealth of YouTube live transcriptions of the Goldbergs during the pandemic, particularly the settings for strings and woodwinds, showing Bach exemplary realization of these profound variations, especially the opening sarabande and closing return. |
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Goldberg variations manuscript |
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Kim Patrick Clow wrote (November 29, 2021):
A good friend of mine who has an autograph and memorabilia business sent this link a few minutes ago. With tongue in cheek, I will add: for the asking price of 300,000 US dollars, this solves the thorny question of what to buy for that one person who has everything ;)
[J.S. BACH] GOLDBERG VARIATIONS - Important Manuscript Copy by Bach's Student (eBay)
Have a great day |
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New research on the Quodlibet from Bach's Goldberg Variations |
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William L. Hoffman wrote (March 21, 2022):
The Serious Nature of the Quodlibet in Bach's “Goldberg Variations” by Michael Marissen |
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Michael Marissen: "The Serious Nature of the Quodlibet in Bach's "Goldberg Variations" |
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William L. Hoffman wrote (March 29, 2022):
The quodlibet as the final variation and penultimate movement, No. 30, of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" (Wikipedia), in double repeat in place of a final canon, often has been considered a humorous piece of music since its title "Quodlibet" (Bach Digital) is defined as "a musical composition that combines several different melodies [simultaneously or successively] — usually popular tunes [hymn, folk song] — in counterpoint, and often in a light-hearted, humorous manner," says Wikipedia (Wikipedia). Bach scholar-performer David Yearsley considers this music humorous in his recent and challenging essay, "Bach the Humorist" (BML), in Rethinking Bach.1 The "content of the joke is, almost literally, earthy and self-ironizing," says Yearsley (Ibid.: 203), "Bach seeming to mock his own mastery of, and obsessive fascination with, erudite counterpoint." The title "Quodlibet" and the well-known melodies and texts of the two rustic songs "merry old German folk songs" (see https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/BWV988-Quodlibet[Braatz].htm, copy, paste to Google) "Bach uses for his vegetable mash-up inspire appreciation of the high-minded, sublime humor," says Yearsley (Ibid.). Following Yearsley's "Bach the Humorist," comes Bach scholar Michael Marissen's brief new essay, "The Serious Nature of the Quodlibet in Bach's "Goldberg Variations,"2 which traces through reception history the appeal of the Goldberg Quodlibet and contrasts another Bach use of the simultaneous quodlibet of three verbal and instrumental hymn tropes in Estomihi pre-lenten 1725 chorale Cantata 127.3 "This is one very unfunny quodlibet," Marissen remarks (Ibid.: 41), given that the latter church occasion carries no humorous import, or, for that matter, does the final Goldberg variation, except within its title. In contrast to Bach's Quodlibet, BWV 524, a successive and jocular quodlibet in 10-minute musical game celebrating a Bach Family wedding banquet (BCW, the Goldberg Quodlibet (YouTube) as a simultaneous quodlibet "could be serious, even melancholy," says Marissen (Ibid.: 41).
Goldberg "Quodlibet": Two 'Merry Old German Folk Songs'
The humorous appeal of the Goldberg "Quodlibet" historically involves Bach combining two "merry old German folk songs," says Marissen (Ibid.: 40): "Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir g'west" (I have so long been away from you) and "Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben" (Cabbage and turnips have driven me away). "Scholars and enthusiasts have long found this knowledge attractive, for various reasons," Marissen says (Ibid.). "Nationalists fixed on the 'old German' element. Communists embraced the 'folk' element. Most others focused simply on the 'merry'," such as the recent comment of noted pianist András Schiff 4 that the Goldberg "Quodlibet" is "boisterous and very funny," imagining "the Bach family singing it." Says Marissen (Ibid.; 41): "To my ears not even his phenomenal technique and artistry have rendered this music 'very funny'." Marissen documents the sources of the two songs to the turn-of- the-18th-century note on a Goldberg musical print, citing Bach student Johann Christian Kittel, as well as historical references to the "Bach-family gatherings in which humorous quodlibets were sung" and "made up of folk songs." Marissen even cites (Ibid.; 42) a fanciful 1934 German essay with extended metaphor suggesting that the initial 29 variations are the "cabbage and turnips" which have "driven away" the opening melody "Aria" (YouTube: 0:00) which is the "I" of the first folk song, the repeated, concluding "Aria" as the "meat" (YouTube: 1:19:32). Marissen then builds his essay (Ibid.: 43) on three evidentiary sources regarding the textual origins of the two tunes, the first melody in a 1701 German book of sermons, then a 1731 painting, Jan Philips van der Schlichten's "Der Bettelmusiikant" (The Beggar Musician) with a musical incipit (Ibid.: 43, Fig. 2; 44, Fig. 3), and the illusive second tune refrain in a 1773 opera with possible connections to the hymn tune, "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan'' (What God does, that is done well), traced to Kittel's reference to aphorism as an overlay (Ibid.; 43f). "With that hymn, Bach's quodlibet could be heard as proclaiming that ultimately the 'Goldberg Variations' were God's handiwork, not Bach's alone," says Marissen (Ibid.: 44, Fig. 3). "Signing off in this way would certainly chime well with Bach's frequent practice of inscribing Soli Deo gloria ('To God alone glory') at the end of his musical scores," he observes (Ibid.).5
Quodlibet as Hodgepodge
Marissen reviews the term Quodlibet as "a hodgepodge" (Ibid.: 44), which, quoted in "Schlichten's painting, is a visual 'Kraut-und-Rüben,' where musical and domestic objects are mindfully strewn around the room, Bach's quodlibet is a sonic 'Kraut-und-Rüben,' where contrasting spiritual and worldly songs are harmoniously pitched together above a prior bass line." "While there is plenty of humorous material to seek in Bach [see Yearsley's "Bach the Humorist"] it seems the Goldbergs quodlibet is not a good place to find it," concludes Marissen (Ibid.: 44). While some, including Bach himself, may have found it an "extremely clever and witty combination of hymn and folk song," "in light of new evidence the now traditional notion this quodlibet would have been received as simply jocular does look rather unlikely." The "concordant motley 'space' of Bach's joyous quodlibet" shows that "the whole is a lot more than the sum of its parts." In 18th-century Europe, "the authoritative voices of Enlightenment reason, individual experience, and arts-as-entertainment were getting louder and louder," says Marissen (Ibid.; 44f).6 In the Goldberg "Quodlibet" "the suprapersonal spheres of the 'secular' and the 'sacred' were put forward together in an all-embracing harmony. Bach will have written the 'Goldberg Variations' not as a jokesome entertainment nor as a self-expression but as a religious act of premodern Lutheran tribute to the heavenly and earthly realms of God."
Goldberg Variations Perspectives: Glenn Gould
The best way to understand the Goldberg Variations purpose and meaning, as well as the "Quodlibet" Variation 30, is to utilize commentary on this music from key scholars-performers, Glenn Gould, Peter Williams, and Philip Kennicott's Counterpoint: A Memoir Bach and Mourning. Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (BCW) brought the Goldberg Variations to the fore with his first recording in 1955 that was a landmark accomplishment. His Bach Bibliography7 reveals a wealth of writing by and about him. He was a highly gifted writer, audio technician, and video producer. His liner notes for the initial Goldberg recording offer valuable insights.8 The story of the Goldberg composition in the 1802 Bach biography of Nikolaus Forkel (Wikipedia), reveals a Romantic legend "which, despite its extravagant caprice, is difficult to disprove," says Gould (Ibid.: 48). "With renewed vigour, variations 26-29 break upon us and are followed by that boisterous exhibition of Deutsche Freundlichkeit [friendliness] — the Quodlibet. Then, as though it could no longer suppress a smug smile at the progress if its progeny, the original sarabande, anything but a dutiful parent, returns to us to bask in the reflected glory of an aria da capo" (Ibid.; 53). "It is, in about music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor resolution, music which, like Beaudelaire's lovers, 'rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.' It has, then, unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by masterly achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, the vision of the subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency" (Ibid.: 54). Gould offers a caveat for all performer-commentators: "I suspect I may have unwittingly engaged is a dangerous game, ascribing to musical composition attributes which reflect only the analytical approach of the performer. This is an especially vulnerable practice in music of Bach which concedes neither tempo nor dynamic intention, and I caution myself to restrain enthusiasm of an interpretive conviction from identifying itself with the unalterable absolute of the composer's will. Besides, as Bernard Shaw so aptly remarked, parsing is not the business of criticism" (Ibid.; 51).
Perspectives: Peter Williams
Next comes the insight's of the late Peter Williams, the eminent English musicologist, performer, and author (BCW), with three!!! Bach biographies (2004, 2007, 2016),9 the definitive The Organ Music of J.S. Bach (3 vols., Cambridge, 1980-1984), and the Goldberg monograph.10 His description of the music: "the kind of spiritual world it seems to occupy, and the special feelings it arouses in both player and listener," with "its own language, but one made from standard vocabulary," representing "a period's keyboard music at its best" (Ibid.: 1); "a world of experience otherwise unknown," "from a greeting to a farewell, from elegant promising to sadly concluding" (Ibid.: 2). In the Goldberg "Quodlibet" 16-bar structure, says Williams (Ibid.: 88): "the festive character of the last variation is obvious," with "the singing lines of it, the rich four-part harmony (not heard before so fully), the four-bar phrases held together and as if inevitable." "In serving rather like a chorale at the end of a Leipzig cantata in which all the performers would join — but now more highly spirited — the last variation is the most illusive of all" and "such semi-improvised music-making was not necessarily frivolous" (Ibid.: 88). The illusive first tune suggests the Goldberg "as a carefully planned cycle coming to an end," "phrases probably migrated from one sing to another" as "something found elsewhere in mature Bach," such as "the 'Search and ye shall find' canons in the Musical Offering." The other tune, "Kraut-und-Rüben," Williams compares to the Bergamasca (also in G major) in Girolamo Frescobaldi's Fiori musicali of 1635 (known to Bach), "where the handling of imitation, different themes, beautiful harmonic turns, natural melodiousness, contrapuntal combination and changes of metre are in there way comparable" (Ibid.: 91).
Perspectives: Personal Insights
The insights of performer Glenn Gould and musicologist Peter Williams are rounded off with new, special, personal insights of Philip Kennicott's Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning.11 Kennicott, former Gramophon columnist and current Washington Post critic, studies the Goldbergs as a tribute to his late mother. He offers the following comments: "Studying Bach is a bit like studying Shakespeare: There is an enormous imbalance between the depth and breadth of the artistic legacy on the one hand, and the paucity of reliable biographical evidence on the other" (Ibid.: 31),12 while, "In the case of Bach, the music confirms what little we know of his personality" (Ibid.: 32). The Goldberg origin "anecdote may get all of these details wrong, may in fact simply invent things that never happened," Kennicott says (Ibid.: 33), "but it raises fascinating questions about how music was performed in the middle of the eighteenth century." Musical perspectives have changed in the almost three centuries since the Goldbergs were composed and Kennicott suggests (Ibid.): "It's entirely possible that that what we might consider musically laborious — closely following a complex contrapuntal score — was not felt as work in the eighteenth century." "The quodlibet of the thirtieth variation is a bumptious piece, and more engagingly tuneful that many of the pages that precede it," says Kennicott (Ibid.: 63). "One of the references in the work was a popular drinking song: 'If my mother cooked some meat, I'd stay here without question.' So the variations, one of the most monumental pieces in Bach's oeuvre, builds to its conclusion with a comic reference to family and a playful allusion to hunger." Finally (Ibid.: 99), "We live in an age that believes art is a communal experience, that the pleasure of music only exists in being shared. But a work like the Goldberg Variations also brings with it a deeply private sense of discovery, pleasures that are difficult or impossible to share, that may not be pleasures at all, but simply moments of intuition and awareness that are meaningful to us alone." Kennicott goes on in his personal, autobiographical memoir, to talk, interspersed at length, about Glenn Gould (Ibid.: 132-40), Bach's Scheibe controversy (Ibid.: 170-72), and Bach's personal letters and mythology (Ibid.: 190-201). He concludes with personal reflections on specific Goldberg Variations (Ibid; 220-25) and a comment on the 'Quodlibet' (Ibid.: 226f): "Did he intend anything at all by the words that were often sung to these melodic lines? He belonged to a musical tradition that frequently repurposed melodic ideas without concern for their original texts, somethings he did relatively often in his cantatas, where it is dangerous to read too much into the recycling of a melody that may have been associated with strikingly different words and sentiments in an earlier context. But both songs touch upon themes from Bach's life for which there is evidence even in the scant anecdotal material we have, including his having left home at a young age and the experience of early poverty and even hunger." Finally (Ibid.: 228), "Whatever it was, the quodlibet exists to connect laughter to ideas of transcendence or philosophical acceptance. Bach wants to tether one of his most ambitious musical creations to memories of a family gathering, not to keep it earthbound, but to insist on an essential connection between lightness of spirit and greatness of spirit."
ENDNOTES
1Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021: 193-225), Amazon.com: "Look inside."
2 Michael Marissen, "The Serious Nature of the Quodlibet in Bach's "Goldberg Variations," in CrossAccent 29, No. 3 (2021): 40-45 (Valpariso IN: Association of Lutheran Church Musicians); article, The Serious Nature of the Quodlibet in Bach's “Goldberg Variations” by Michael Marissen (BCW).
3 Simultaneous quodlibet: chorale Cantata 127, "Herr Jesu Christ, wahr' Mensch und Gott" (Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man), with hymn quotations from the German Agnus Dei (Christe, du Lamm Gottes) and the Passion Chorale.
4 András Schiff, Music Comes Out of Silence (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020: 156), Amazon.com.
5 See Footnote 15 in Marissen (Ibid.: 45): "For a close consideration of this practice of Bach's, see Michael Marissen, "Bach against Modernity in Rethinking Bach, ed. Bettina Varwig (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021), 317-20.
6 See also Marissen, "The Biographical Significance of Bach's Handwritten Entries in his Calov Bible," in Lutheran Quarterly 34, no. 4 (Winter 2020: 375-78), Project Muse.
7 Glenn Gould Bach Bibliography, Bach-Bibliographie.
8 Goldberg Recording liner notes, Glenn Gould: The Bach Box, The Remastered Columbia Recordings (Sony Music, 2020), Sony Classical.
9 Peter Williams, three Bach biographies: Google Search.
10 Peter Williams, Goldberg monograph, The Goldberg Variations, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge; Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), Amazon.com.
11 Philip Kennicott, Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning (New York: Norton, 2020), Amazon.com.
12 Bach biography: "Bach's biography has been compared to Shakespeare's, where little first-hand, source-critical information is extant. In both cases, secondary information involves formative contextual studies of topics such as the works, education, life-style, learning, politics, and the arts" (source: "Bach Biography: History, Topics; Recent, New Perspectives," BCW); written sources: See Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004, eBooks: Free Download) and Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2009; NY Times).
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To come: Rethinking Bach, Part III, Meanings; Chapter 9, Daniel R. Melamed, "Rethinking Bach Codes." |
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