Bach sits down after a hearty meal to play through these new Handel variations, fresh off the printing press. The postal coach arrives a big pile of music comes from wherever. This made me fantasize a music-historical moment. The upshot being: if you ever want to suffer an incredibly tedious time, if you want to be impelled to stick a fork in your brain just to stop the endless flood of mundanity, listen to Handel's 62 Variations. It so happens-by a twist of fate-that these variations are on the same first eight bass notes as the Goldbergs, and moreover that the last variation of the 62 (!) is a kind of canon, sort of a primitive harbinger of the amazing canons of the Goldbergs, etc. He says, in effect, yes this is bound to be boring but I am going to be so masterful that you will be in awe and not care even if you will be bored.īrief musicological diversion: I feel pretty strongly encouraged by various scholars (who have presumably done their homework) that Bach was aware of a set of variations by Handel written some decades earlier, published in 1733.
#Assign hotkey quod libet full
To be fair, Bach charges at this fact with full foreknowledge, even brazenly. The Goldbergs are a fool's errand attempted by the greatest genius of all time.Īll of which is to say that the Goldbergs are genetically predisposed to be boring, and they cannot totally elude the trap set for them by their premise. This is more than a compositional roadblock it's essentially a recipe for monotony and failure. Not only is it G major, but it is always, (nauseatingly?) the same sequence of harmonies within G major. No amount of artistry and inspiration (sorry Glenn, not even you) can make you forget that you are hearing 80 minutes of G major it's like trying not to notice Mount Everest. Then (without a bathroom break) think very similar thoughts for 79 more minutes, winding around the same basic themes, and then you will have some idea of what it's like to experience-you might even say survive-the Goldbergs. The piece is eighty minutes long, and mostly in G major. The first flaw of this masterpiece is a doozy. I'd like to really let loose on the Goldbergs, to make the case against them, to discuss why they're not worth discussing. Then something came over me: an urge to be terrible. The Goldbergs are a fool's errand attempted by the greatest genius of all time. If there's anything more terrifying than adding another recording to the existing legacy, it's the idea of adding even one more word to the quivering mass of adulatory Goldberg verbiage. Words seem to bounce off the notes of the Goldbergs, like they're impregnable. When NPR asked me to do these Goldberg blog posts, I cleverly used the denial portion of my brain to forget my dread. I have been assimilated into the Goldberg Borg. I worried for years that I would be seduced into playing them, and would become like all the others-besotted, cultish-and that is exactly what happened. Classical Music is not really supposed to be that popular.
Yes, I'm suspicious of the Goldbergs' popularity. They're like a trendy bar that (infuriatingly) keeps staying trendy. Not a moment goes by when someone doesn't release a new recording, accompanied by breathless press. The best reason to hate Bach's Goldberg Variations-aside from the obvious reason that everyone asks you all the time which of the two Glenn Gould recordings you prefer-is that everybody loves them. (Jeremy Denk joins us all week to explore the Goldberg Variations.
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