| History (based on materials from www.music.qub.ac.uk and the Grove Dictionary of Music): The Goldberg Variations are the last of a series of keyboard music Bach published under the title of "Clavierübung", and are often regarded as the most ambitious composition ever written for harpsichord. Despite its high profile character, however, we know little about what Bach intended with the piece. The work was first published in 1741 under the title "Aria with diverse variations", while the addition of the name "Goldberg" seems to have been the creative license of the composer's first biographer, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, who, some sixty years later, traced the genesis of the piece to the figures of a Count Keyserlingk, former Russian ambassador to the Elector of Saxony and Bach's avid supporter, and a harpsichordist in his service, namely Johann Goldberg, for whom the work was supposedly written to be played as a remedy for the count's troubled sleep. Many inconsistencies in the story - in particular, the young age of Goldberg who was 14 when the work was first published and the suggested philosophical meaning of the variations themselves - contradict the credibility of Forkel's account; however, the title, as it were, stuck to the work which remains to this very day one of the maestro's most important achievements. The Goldberg Variations marks the end of Bach's fruitful "middle period" and opens the door to his final one in which the "canon" adopts a seminal place in his ... |
