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of four descending notes, a vaster classical endoskeleton than even the Romantic giants inspired by his complex example devised.
Then he reverses the descent, and the same notes ascend. Bach puts in clever chromatic aberrations on the path upwards, in the way that, much later, Haydn would put in wrong notes and add clever comments on the melody into the melody itself, a kind of kibbitzing (scribbling in the mar- gins of one’s own manuscript), as Balzac would do (Balzac made so many additions to his first drafts that all his profits were eaten up by proofreading).
And of course Bach ends these wildly fragmented descend- ing episodes with a witty ascending group of four notes, and rounds out the symmetry of the piece by finishing with a final chordal trill in the original key in which the variation (and the entire piece) begins.
Variation 30 Quodlibet: “As soon as they were assembled, a chorale was first struck up,” Bach’s first biographer, Johann Forkel, wrote. “From this devout beginning they proceeded to jokes which were frequently in strong contrast. That is, they then sang popular songs partly of comic and also partly of indecent content, all mixed together on the spur of the moment. . . . This kind of improvised harmonizing they called a Quodlibet, and not only could laugh over it quite whole-heartedly themselves, but also aroused just as hearty and irresistible laughter in all who heard them.”
Forkel (whose library forms the core of the Berlin State Library) thus believes this last variation is meant as a joke. It contains humorous folk songs about food, such as Kraut und Rüben (cabbage and turnips), which was used earlier in
a 32-part Partita by the composer Dieterich Buxtehude. If you count the themes at both ends of Bach’s variations, there are also 32 parts.
The return of the initial theme, the Aria, suddenly reveals how many works there are in any one melody. You can hear
how half the melody is composed of grace notes, of orna- ments meant to be added or varied at the discretion of the performer. After centuries of tradition, most of these parenthetical comments on the melody have become an expected part of the piece, but there is room still for individual contribution. This is a very regulated form of aleatory music, where the composer and the performer collaborate on the choices made at the last second. It was adopted by avant-garde composers such as Varèse, Berio, and Xenakis in Paris and Rome, in an attempt to seek “harmony within mankind” in the 1970s, but this is where it started.
The ear remembers the shape of the last variations, all of which have focused on the descending bass of the Aria itself, so the root of the entire piece is embedded in our unconscious memory. It is as if Bach is saying, look around, see how many wonders of the world are hidden in the small details of daily life.
And how many wonders of the instrument and of the performer, how many voices and gifts must be combined to produce this, one of the great achievements of musical history?
2018 Summer Season 241