8 things to know about Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Often argued to be one of the composer’s greatest keyboard works, the variations plot a journey through space and time, and have proved a fascinating challenge to musicians for the best part of a century.

The latest to tackle Bach’s work here at the Southbank Centre was pianist Víkingur Ólafsson in the summer of 2023, and ahead of his Royal Festival Hall concert we took a closer look at the history behind Bach’s famous work.

The Goldberg Variations was published during Bach’s lifetime

‘So what?’, you may think, but this is actually quite unusual, as only around ten percent of the composer’s music was printed whilst he was still alive. Published in 1741, only nineteen copies of the first edition survive today. The most valuable of these is Bach’s personal copy of the published score, which was only discovered in 1974. It was found in Strasbourg by the French musicologist Olivier Alain and includes corrections made by the composer to a number of printing errors, as well as additional music in the form of 14 handwritten canons. The score now resides in Paris, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

It is named after the work’s first performer

Well, supposedly, but we’ll come to that in a moment. The Goldberg in question is Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who was the private musician of Count Hermann Karl von Keyserling. According to Johann Nikolaus Forkel, the first biographer of Bach, the composer penned the variations for Goldberg at the request of Keyserling who has asked for ‘some clavier pieces… which should be of such a gentle and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights’. The Count wished, via the music, to be given some respite from the poor sleep he suffered on account of a persistent illness.

Although this story behind Bach’s composition is often disputed

The problem with Forkel’s origin story is that no-one is quite sure where it came from; his biography was published in 1802, more than half a century after Bach’s death, and the composer’s sons were too far from Leipzig to have shared the tale with Forkel. And if this story is true, why did they become known as the Goldberg Variations and not the Keyserling Variations? And then there is Goldberg’s age; as Peter Uehling, writing for the Berlin Philharmoniker, asks, ‘Did Bach really entrust a work of sometimes immense technical difficulty and great expressive depth to [a person] who in 1741 was only 14 years old?’ The mystery remains.

The work contains 30 variations in total

The basis for the composition is its opening aria in G major, and the work then includes 30 variations upon this initial melody. Bach asked that every passage of variation be played twice, but it isn’t always performed as such, meaning recitals can vary between 40 and 80 minutes in length.

It was written for the harpsichord

The composer’s own specification was that the piece was written for a two-manual harpsichord, the keyboard instrument of the day. However, it is now more commonly performed on the piano, and has actually been transcribed for a great number of other instruments, including the harp, classical guitar, string trio and even the accordion.

It wasn’t always such a well known piece

Despite being considered one of Bach’s greatest keyboard works, you would have been hard pressed to hear it performed in the first 150 years of its existence. Although it is believed at least 100 copies were printed on the Goldberg Variations’ initial publication, there are no records of it being included in any public performance for a century and a half. Not until the late 19th century did the work begin to appear in concert recitals, but even then, these performances were largely scholarly endeavours.

The first recording was made in 1933

That the work is so prominent today can largely be attributed to the polish musician Wanda Landowska. A pioneer of the revival of the harpsichord, Landowska was the first musician to record the Goldberg Variations. Having first performed the piece in May 1933, in November she committed the Variations to vinyl in Paris, performing on a late 19th-century iron-framed harpsichord by Pleyel. Writing for Gramophone, Stephen Plaistow notes, ‘Landowska was not alone in her attempts to rehabilitate the harpsichord, but it was she who re-established it with the public, together with the riches of its repertory and it was she more than anyone who brought the Goldberg Variations back to life’.

It’s most famous performance is by Glenn Gould

In the 90 years since Landowska’s initial recording more than 600 further recordings of the Goldberg Variations have been published. The most famous of these belongs to the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. In 1955, at the age of just 22, Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations as part of a new recording contract with Columbia Records. By ignoring Bach’s repeat markings, Gould’s performance lasted just 39 minutes, enabling it to neatly fit on an LP. Released in January 1956, the album had sold 40,000 copies by 1960, launching the pianist’s career and catapulting the Goldberg Variations into the classical keyboard canon.