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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750): Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
This is the ultimate achievement of music; it is where modern music began. To play this immense work is also the greatest achievement of virtuosity, mastering its hundreds of labyrinths, its thousands of touches and tempos, twisting so many strands into one rope. It is one thing to invent an equation; it is another thing to make it fun. Is Bach just the triumph of rote memorization, or is free will possible in the midst of all these crisscrossing patterns? Concerts can be so demanding and terrifying that many pianists don’t remem- ber if they even played, let alone what or how they played. Rote memory sneaks in under the frozen hypothalamus of the brain.
My teacher Russell Sherman always insisted that this was why you had to think as you played, that, even in the throes of the deepest surges of memory (needed for a piece this complex), flexibility and choice were necessary to let the piece breathe, expand, and contract the way the audience’s comprehension does during a concert. This is one reason the consummate Bach pianist Glenn Gould hated concerts: audience expectation interfered with the choices he wanted to make on his own.
Many notes had been written before Bach’s great master- pieces, but no composer before had managed to unearth such a universe of meaning and beauty from intense explorations of structure. Notes are the Platonic shadows in our cave, the avatars, the surrogates, the keys which unlock a galaxy of coincidence, correspondence, harmony, and revelation, which provide a wormhole into parallel dimensions of the soul.
Music, the daughter of number and sound, on an equal basis with the fundamental laws of
the human mind and of nature, is naturally the preferred way to express the universe in its fun- damental abstraction. Modern science brings
us to a more primeval knowledge of music, and by expanding the imagination of the musician it moves him towards unknown horizons.
— Iannis Xenakis
There are only nineteen copies of the original text of the Goldbergs, of which one is a printer’s proof, with corrections made by Bach. Very little printed matter stands between civilization and the loss of our greatest achievements. When William Shakespeare died in 1616, only half of his plays had ever been printed, as scripts for actors. Another 18 plays are known today only because they were printed in the first collected edition of his plays, the 1623 First Folio.
When Vivaldi died, the 450 manuscripts found in his house went through eight owners; a complete edition was published only in 1947. One of his works wasn’t discovered until 2005.
Bach himself was mostly lost to society until his reputation was revived by Mendelssohn in 1829 and then again by Pablo Casals, who was the first to record all six of Bach’s Cello Suites in 1939 (they had formerly been thought only for study, not performance). Casals changed the way Bach was heard with his lilting versions of the Brandenburg Concertos at the Prades Festival in 1950 and again at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1965, with Rudolf Serkin playing the stunning piano cadenza in the Fifth Concerto.
The score of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos was sold for
the equivalent of 24 dollars after the death of its owner, King Frederick William I of Prussia, in 1734, and lost until 1849.
The Goldbergs were intended for a two-manual harpsichord, like the “William Hyman 1980” owned by Tippet Rise.
The way you play the Goldbergs makes an almost Buddhist statement about your stage in life. When Glenn Gould made his first recording, it was of the Goldbergs, fast and brash.
236 The Music at Tippet Rise