Goldberg Variations - Aria

About this Piece

The Aria of the Goldberg Variations is a slow, noble sarabande that serves as the structural blueprint for one of the most intellectually dense monuments in keyboard history. Published in 1741 as the final volume of his Clavier-Übung series, it arrived amidst a legend as persistent as it is likely fabricated. According to the biographer Forkel, Count Keyserling requested "spirit-lifting" music to combat his chronic insomnia, tasking his private harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, with playing in the antechamber. The irony of commissioning a work of such staggering technical volatility to induce sleep is not lost on modern listeners; if the fourteen-year-old Goldberg actually performed these variations at three in the morning, one suspects the Count remained awake simply out of sheer, terrified awe. Structurally, the work is a mathematical marvel, built not upon the Aria's elegant melody but upon its stubborn thirty-two bar bass line. While the melody is a fashionable, "gallant" creation found years earlier in the domestic notebook of Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena, the subsequent variations represent a rigorous defense of Bach's "artful" counterpoint against contemporary critics who found his style too turgid. By the time this Aria returns in the final da capo, it has been utterly transformed by the technical exertion of the preceding movements. It is no longer just a "soul-enhancing" refreshment but a quiet, somewhat weary homecoming after a journey through the outer reaches of musical possibility.