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ascension. This is the stuff of miracles. Notes become the wardrobe door in C.S. Lewis, the mirror in Lewis Carroll: notes become wormholes where ordinary dimensions are transmigrated into extraordinary dimensions. This is the halfway point in this long and demanding exegesis of spirit and charm. I feel there should be an intermission here. Too much genius is an exhausting thing.
Note that there’s been the wild celebration of the 13th variation, followed by the compensatory transmigration of souls. The metamorphosis is complete: we have spoken to the angels, we have touched the heavens, we are restored. How can there be more to come?
Variation 16 Ouverture: Like an entirely different piece, this overture opens with a cinematic chord and introductory scale, and a few separated trills before moving into a dance which expands the trills into scales. The challenge in the second half is to figure out how the variations are connect- ed to the main theme. Bach makes many of the themes very simple, but keeps them farther away logically from the familiar chords of the melody, so it’s more of a job sleuthing out the connections.
Today the urban myth is discredited, where Bach wrote
the pieces for his friend Goldberg, who had to play them to help his boss, Count Kaiserling, conquer his insomnia. The concentration necessary in the second half of this enormous work does seem at times, however, like a descent into the depths of a drugged incantation, an exploration at the bot- tom of the cave of consciousness.
Variation 17: This toccata is somewhat like Bach’s C-minor Prelude from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which has both hands doing the same thing but with one hand the inverted mirror image of the other, so they both start at the outside and meet in the middle. Here he’s opened that idea up into a broader universe, so the intense Rorschach pattern goes higher into the spring sky and down into the waking swamps. Two similar stories are inverted to make opposites which mostly live at their
extremes until their breezy, seemingly independent flighti- ness meets in the middle.
Variation 18 Canone alla Sesta: A very calm afternoon walk through a beautiful meadow. Repeated patterns based on a “turn” (where notes revolve around a central anchoring note) gradually turn into a more melodic tune while the left hand plays the same harmony in scales. This repeats rather than develops, and gradually subsides.
Variation 19: A variation on the previous variation. A calm melody floats over scales in the middle and low registers.
Variation 20: The hands mirror each other, right descending as left ascends, syncopated so that they are cushioned on
air as they seem to float together and drift apart. Sustained turns climb rapidly in the bass as the right hand comments in the margins, and uses arpeggios in the right hand to make the same points as the turns in the left hand, broadening the scope of this dialogue of opposites until the rapid end. This is one of Bach’s charming virtuosic dances, where technical prowess is necessary for the moto perpetuo, which, however, is really a simple dance in disguise.
Variation 21 Canone alla Settima: The melody here climbs in single notes under the moving treble scales. The single notes are chromatic—that is, they move upwards by half notes; they seem to be sneaking up on some target which is never identified. Then the left hand takes the scales and the right hand the crablike crawling melody.
Variation 22 Alla breva: The left hand modulates up and down simply, the way a rock song would, almost like a two-legged animal climbing slowly up and then back down. The treble melody is the exact same pattern, but upside down. So the effect is of two people crawling towards each other.
Variation 23: This virtuosic scale variation is broken into eleven-note scales with a rest. The hands at the end unite to play thirds together (that is, the right hand plays three notes
2018 Summer Season 239