Bach: Goldberg Variations - Igor Levit
The Goldberg Variations are regarded as Bach’s mightiest work for keyboard along with The Art of Fugue. Igor Levit approached the work from various angles, by studying variation form per se and coming to terms with early music as a whole.
Read more…The world from every angle
Anselm Cybinski
A spirit of mercurial volatility
He has already released a benchmark recording of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, and his reading of the stylized dance movements from Bach’s Six Partitas proved no less accomplished. But it is with the variation principle that Igor Levit identifies most readily. For him, variations have always been “the most delightful of musical forms,” the pianist explains in conversation. “The quicker the change and the higher the frequency, the better. I need this, I need these colourful and varied characters. I regard variations as travel books, accounts of journeys that lead from A to B, but also accounts of people who set off on their journey as one person but who are already someone else by the time that they reach their destination. I never know in advance how I shall react to the various stages of my journey and in what state of mind I shall be when I reach my journey’s end. And yet I have always felt safe and protected on such travels.” All feeling of ceremonial is alien to Levit’s whole nature – as a still very young musician, he is the very opposite of the other-worldly high priest presiding over his instrument. Rather, he is the spirit of mercurial volatility, thinking, speaking and writing in the fleetest of tempos, a virtuoso of lightning communication transmitting on several channels at once and, last but not least, an unequivocal contemporary who takes a passionate interest in day-to-day events in the world of politics and in society in general. His inner processor is in overdrive and demands to be constantly fed. Everything is of interest to him, and he responds to stimuli wherever he finds them, and yet barely has he sat down at the piano when he exudes a calm and a sense of tranquillity that suggest that he is able to draw on the very wellsprings of human existence.
In search of inner significance
No other medium offers such a grateful field of activity for a rapid understanding of memorable musical characters as the art of variation. As Beethoven’s American biographer Maynard Solomon has astutely observed, it is not “fate” that comes knocking on the door in these variations, as it does in the great sonata movements. Such concepts as necessity and inevitability need a dialectical musical pattern within which to express their message – that is, a form structured around polarities right down to the very last detail, whereas in Solomon’s view variation form takes as its subject “the adventurer, the picaro, the quick-change artist” and, above all, “the thinker who doubts perception, who shapes and reshapes reality in search of its inner significance”. Here Igor Levit is entirely in his element, identifying with the particular musical situation and at the same time maintaining his distance from it – only when taken together do these two mind-sets determine the performer’s interpretative approach to any given set of variations. Everywhere there lurks the danger of trivializing these works and of rendering them innocuous by stressing their short-breathed, kaleidoscopic aspects. Only when their performer is in charge of their overall structure can he or she generate the tension that is built up over longer periods and that composers were always so keen to achieve.
Bach: Rhetoric and order
As long ago as the mid-1950s the young Glenn Gould’s record company, CBS, reacted with scepticism when he announced that he wanted to make his gramophone début with Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. Only in the wake of the tremendous success of this release did more and more performers express an interest in the single most ambitious keyboard work of the 18th century, with the result that only then did it begin to lose something of its exceptional status in listeners’ general perception. The ‘Goldberg Variations’ continue to retain their popularity not least because they allow us to experience unity in variety in the most direct way. The work’s kaleidoscopic wealth of ideas is held in balance by its calmly recurring chord progressions, while the succession of brief and perfectly proportioned movements gives listeners the feeling that they are surrounded by a world of gently resonating harmonies. But Levit’s scruples with regard to the ‘Goldberg Variations’ rest only in part on their aura of uniqueness. “I’d always been opposed to playing the piece,” he explains. “Ultimately, it is clearly intended for a two-manual harpsichord, and some of the passages involving the crossing of hands can’t really be played convincingly on a modern grand piano. My favourite recordings of the ‘Goldberg Variations’ are all by harpsichordists. But at some point the time came when I simply had to do it.” Only Levit’s sustained interest in Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli Variations’ and in the monumental set of variations by the American composer Frederic Rzewski, ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated!’, gave Levit the courage that he needed to tackle this work. Levit’s interest in early music up to the time of Bach revealed itself at a very early date, and by sixteen he already felt the need for special lessons in the field of historically informed performance practice. “Lajos Rovatkay, the great harpsichordist, organist and ensemble leader from Budapest, was a pupil of Helmut Walcha and for years taught at the Hanover Academy of Music, so he was effectively my neighbour. One of his students was Andreas Staier, who described him as one of the most fascinating musicians he had ever encountered. One day I simply rang him up.” Lajos Rovatkay drew his young colleague’s attention to the motets of Josquin des Prez and he also introduced him to composers such as Frescobaldi, Muffat and Kerll, whose works he began to play with increasing frequency at his recitals. “I had a few harpsichord lessons with him, but above all we listened to lots of music together and talked about it, and in the end I began to understand the foundations on which Bach’s music is built. We approached Bach himself only very slowly. My understanding of his art is now strongly marked by my engagement with older text-based music – by Josquin and Palestrina, for example. In Bach I find such a sense of entreaty, so much thirst for the truth, such expansiveness and such flattery, all of them emotions in which speaking and singing seem to come into direct contact with each other. But, of course, there is also this vast sense of architectural form: the piece is so big that I feel more like an intermediary who has to keep a low profile because I have to shoulder such a tremendous burden of responsibility for such a fragile overall experience. I don’t think that I could ever go on tour with this work!”
The variation as a vehicle for tolerance
Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, famously relates how Bach was commissioned to write the ‘Goldberg Variations’ by Count Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk, the Russian ambassador at the Dresden Court and a man said to suffer from insomnia. The idea was for his harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, to play Bach’s variations to him while he lay awake at night. More recent research has raised serious doubts about this version of events and called the whole legend into question. Not only did the first printed edition of the work lack any dedication to the count when it appeared in print in Nuremberg in 1741, but Goldberg was only thirteen in 1740 and, as such, can hardly have been equal to the piece’s technical demands. The English writer on Bach, Peter Williams, has suggested that the ‘Goldberg Variations’ may have been intended as a display vehicle for Bach’s oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who was then living in Dresden and whose career Bach was, as always, eager to promote. This does not preclude the possibility that the work was designed from the outset as the final, culminating part of the ‘Clavier-Übung’ series of publications. Within the context of Bach’s exploration of all the current types of keyboard music in the earlier books of his ‘Clavier-Übung’, the ‘Goldberg Variations’ would demonstrate the way in which movements of the most varied kind can be developed from a single bass line and/or harmonic sequence, movements that range from character-pieces of every type to highly effective bravura numbers and, finally, to examples of the strictest canonic procedures. “How far can I go and still remain tied to my anchor?” Igor Levit asks. “How much of the world can I embrace without losing my way? These are questions that implicitly hang in the air in the case of every set of variations.” One by one, Bach explores dancelike, virtuosic and learned keyboard models, which he examines in a relatively systematic manner. And he too accepts that a certain level of tolerance is built into variation form: instead of a tenth canon at the end, just before the return of the Aria, we have an elaborate Quodlibet, a kind of medley of popular tunes. Here the harmonically dense music strikes a note that is solemn and almost triumphant. Yet the songs that Bach combines with his bass line are markedly earthy in character. “Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir g’west” (I have for so long been away from you), sings one voice, while the other comments “Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben” (Cabbage and beet have driven me away). Levit is convinced that this is an insider joke on Bach’s part. “The Quodlibet deals with the lengthy absence of the Aria and, as it were, begs it to return, while cabbage and beet are the thirty elaborate variations that have held the ‘empfindsam’ Aria at bay for so long. Bach adds an element of irony to the form to which he has just raised the greatest of musical monuments!”