Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” arranged for String Quartet

On the whole Bach’s keyboard works – probably more than anyone else’s – admit of a vast range of interpretations. Composers from Mozart to Stravinsky have sought to illuminate Bach’s contrapuntal complexities by re-scoring his works for expanded forces, thereby giving added dimensions of color and space to his monochromatic keyboard blueprints. Above all two of Bach’s last, greatest, and most encyclopedic works, the so-called “Goldberg Variations” and the “Art of Fugue,” call loudly for adaptations to new media, and repay such experiments richly.

Long beloved of musical connoisseurs, Bach’s “Air with Sundry Variations” won the nickname “Goldberg” thanks to Bach’s student Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who played them to acclaim during the composer’s lifetime. The variations were later admired by Beethoven, who used them as a model for his benchmark “Diabelli” Variations. In more recent times they burst into the public eye through Glenn Gould’s breathtakingly virtuosic recordings of 1955 and 1981.

The “Goldberg Variations” survey a broad sweep of compositional methods and techniques, from light song styles to learned counterpoint, from staid Renaissance-style polyphony to dazzling instrumental virtuosity. While a keyboard may suffice to bring off these many-sided compositional feats, Bach’s music gains even greater brilliance and clarity when taken up by a group of instruments that give due weight to each of the contrapuntal lines of the musical web. Perhaps no ensemble is more readily equipped to do this than the modern string quartet, whose four constituent instruments handily fit the demands of range and flexibility made by Bach’s intricate counterpoint.

Bach himself was no stranger to such reworkings. He made ensemble transcriptions of his own keyboard works, and conversely he made keyboard reductions of ensemble compositions – including those of other composers. In adapting the “Goldberg Variations” to the string quartet we follow a time-honored tradition of putting great music into the capable hands of those who love it.

Bill Cowdery

William Cowdery is a senior lecturer at Cornell University and musical director and organist of the First Congregational Church, Ithaca, NY. He has taught at Ithaca College, Colgate University, and Keuka College as performer, musicologist, and theorist. Cowdery holds a PhD from Cornell for a dissertation on the early cantatas of JS Bach and has written articles in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music and the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1996), as well as co-editing with Neal Zaslaw The Compleat Mozart (1999).