Variations on Infinity

“Bach for when I need to understand, Beethoven when I need courage,” said Susan, or words to that effect. So what am I listening to, just now?

Bach—Goldberg Variations, as arranged for string trio.

Right, so now you get the picture. A major victory for LGBT has left me feeling less than elated; now it’s time to get back to an emotional even keel. It’s time to get over the rant and the rage, and there’s nothing better than Bach for that.

OK, this work comes with a story that may or not be true. Goldberg was a musician in the electoral court of the Saxony, employed by the Russian ambassador, Count Keyserlingk. And the count, so goes the story, couldn’t sleep. So Bach was pressed into service; could he write some nice soporific music that Goldberg could play to lull him to sleep? 

Bach decided to write a set of thirty variations on a theme, an aria which is a sarabande, an old dance form that Bach would also use in the cello suites. And the count, so the story runs, was delighted—so much that he gave Bach a gold goblet filled with 100 louis-d’or.

Well, the story was written some sixty years after the work was published, Bach was long dead, and face it—it has that Washington-chopping-down-the-cherry-tree feeling. As well, I’m always a little skeptical about stories that have louis-d’or in them… 

Most of Bach’s works went unpublished in his lifetime; the Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, were an exception. And it’s our good luck to have 19 of the first editions still in existence—one of which has corrections in Bach’s own hand. Oh, and also a set of fourteen canons.

Well, I was familiar with the work—I walked for months to the beach while listening to it in those raw days when I had lost my mind and my job (in order of importance if not chronology). But what I didn’t know is that there is an internal structure, though I sensed it. Every third variation is a canon, which means that one instrument is playing the same thing slightly later (think “row, row, row your boat…”). After the canon, Bach wrote what Wikipedia calls a genre piece—baroque dances, a couple of aria, a fughetta. After the genre piece comes what one musician calls an arabesque—a fast, lively piece with the left or right hand crossing over the other.

There are also variations that are heart-wrenchingly poignant, including one which Wanda Landowska termed “The black pearl.” They are almost too painful to listen to; Bach has ripped his chest open, the ribs are bloody and broken, the fist-sized heart is clenching and unclenching amid the blood and cartilage. You want not to look, but you have to. It’s agonizing music to hear.

But one day I did, and here’s what I wrote:

So each morning I walked to the beach listening to the Goldberg Variations. And then, after a week of turmoil, I walked by the walls of the old city to the mouth of the harbor, and confronted the open sea. 

And heard the music you’ll hear below.

And said, finally, goodbye to Franny.

Who’s gone, and who isn’t.

I was crying, I was shaking, I was wracked with gratitude for a woman who had given me life. And I was amazed that she had placed her own life in my hands, and entrusted me with her death.

She had all the nobility of all her dogs and cats for whom she had done them same.

“You can go now,” I said. “I’m OK now.”

And I was.

“There’s some music that never really stops, that just goes on and on forever, on some other plane,” a cello teacher once said about the worst piece of music Bach ever wrote, the prelude to the first cello suite. I didn’t believe it about the prelude, but about the Goldberg Variations?

Totally.