In 2018, I received an unusual commission: to write an essay on Bach’s Goldberg Variations (composed 1741) for the program of the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s (ACO) performance. The subject was intimidating. I’m more familiar with sticky dives than opera halls, and fonder of Bacharach than Bach, but with some time, an immersion in several interpretations of the Variations, and interviews with the ACO’s artistic director, Richard Tognetti, as well as the performance’s arranger – the world-renowned Bernard Labadie, who was then recovering from cancer – the following was written. It’s been lightly edited.
Bernard Labadie knows precisely when and why he wanted to become a musician. “Bach was the reason,” he says. “Sometime in December 1974 or ‘75. The dead of winter. It was a Christmas concert with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra and choir. The first piece of the program was the first cantata of the Christmas Oratorio, and I’ll never forget the impression the chorus made on me. It changed my life completely. I got so excited. The Bach absolutely nailed me. I knew this is what I wanted to do.”
The day I speak with Labadie is the same day – the first in many – that the renowned conductor has been able to read. Like Bach, Labadie developed cataracts. Unlike Bach, he hasn’t fatally suffered from their removal. Labadie says the hostile frosting is “the last gift of my cancer in 2014 [and] induced from all the medication I receive, mostly Cortisone. Now I need two more laser surgeries and after that everything will be perfect. I can literally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that if Bach, or Handel, had known my doctor they’d be in great shape.”
In 2014, Labadie was diagnosed with lymphoma. Its work was aggressively swift, and he was placed for a month in a medically-induced coma. In that time, Labadie’s body atrophied – his muscle weight halved – and once he’d emerged from his deathly suspension, had to re-learn how to walk. When he finally resumed conducting, he did so from a chair.
But during his rehabilitation, Labadie never stopped thinking about music. The prospect of death may have reordered his perspective – “I’m living much more in the present time” – but the pleasure and purpose of music remained. So too the centrality of Bach. Labadie speaks as effusively of his talent as he ever has. “The Goldberg Variations are like the Earth spinning on an orbit,” he says. “The sun rises at the beginning, and the end. It’s like the seasons’ cycle. If you know in advance the structure, you can guess what kind of music will come. You cannot guess what actual music will come, but if you know the structure – it’s like the planets in revolution.”
Labadie’s analogy of cosmic harmony isn’t whimsy. For centuries, Bach’s work has astonished musicians with its logical purity and fastidious grammar. Bach’s scores are often examples of music talking to itself – themes are introduced, elaborated, reversed, inverted. A theme will diverge, then triumphantly re-integrate. With the Goldberg Variations, Bach’s theme is elegantly exhausted – it becomes a self-contained cosmos.
Which might suggest that Bach is bloodlessly intellectual – a musical mathematician. He isn’t. Bach treated music, in the words of critic Alex Ross, as a “vessel for the divine” and he worked the laws of music much like those who designed the grand Gothic churches worked the laws of engineering and aesthetics – the paths to heavenly communion were paved with rules. That said, the listener needn’t know them to enjoy the work.
“We were playing a concert,” Richard Tognetti, the ACO’s artistic director, says, “and my brother, who is not musical, he said afterwards ‘Bach is best, isn’t he?’ And he wasn’t identifying with the symmetry. He didn’t know what was under the bonnet. What’s incredible is that you can create great mathematical notation that means nothing. But Bach operates on all those levels: Under the bonnet, the mechanic can dig around and be amazed by how it’s all put together. Or you can just sit back as someone who knows nothing at all and let it wash over you.”
It’s no different for Labadie. Like Tognetti, he now has a rarefied appreciation for Bach’s composition – for the exquisite machinery beneath the bonnet – but he knew none of this when he first heard Bach one Christmas in Quebec. It was a sub-verbal astonishment. “When you’re 11-years-old, you don’t understand architecture,” he says. “But there was something overwhelming about it that made an impression on me without having the keys to understand it. I was feeling it in my body. But understanding doesn’t take the magic away, it actually enhances it.”
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In many of Bach’s scores, duelling elements resolve themselves – but in the centuries since his death, there have been morphing, unresolved disputes about how best to interpret him. And from this, a question emerges: Does reverence inhibit modern interpreters?
Like Shakespeare, little is known biographically about Johann Sebastian Bach. We know the depth of his faith – he left a busily annotated Calov Bible, the most explicit expression of his Lutheran thought. We know of his commitment to his craft – he trekked 400 kilometres through snow to watch the famed organist Dietrich Buxtehude play in Lubeck. And we know of his influence – Beethoven and Mozart were taking notes, and Goethe said of him that it was “as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world”.
But where’s the line between a healthy respect for Bach’s mastery, and dull fetishisation? Baroque and Classical music has its turf wars, and matters of interpretation have long been political. How should one arrange Bach? Transliterate him? Modernise him? Should one? And how much does reverence inspire – and how much does it inhibit? I spoke with both arrangers about the idea of “authenticity” – and, funnily enough, its parallel with debates about the US Constitution.
For decades now, the question of interpreting the US Constitution has, broadly speaking, yielded two groups: Originalists, who stress unbending fidelity to its authors’ words and intentions; and those who argue that their founding document should be respected in its fundamentals, but also treated as a “living, breathing document”.
“People talk about authenticity,” Richard Tognetti says. “‘Just what the composer intended.’ Excuse me? We have no idea what the composer intended. You know, there’s people who claim they can work out how certain words were pronounced at the time of Shakespeare’s performances at the Globe – ‘historical pronunciation’. We have that in music, too.
“How I look at it is: Not for one second would I ever change the gift that Bach’s given us. I’m an originalist, actually. The script really is worth revering if you think it works. But that doesn’t mean the script can’t be adapted, and that you can’t make it sing and zing for other people who might enjoy it more if it’s adapted.”
Fascinatingly, Bernard Labadie suggests that the insistence on musical “authenticity” is, ironically, confected. “One has to understand the concepts of arrangement for a musician in the 18th century,” he says. “It’s very, very different to how we see it nowadays. Somehow we’ve been contaminated by the certain rigour that comes with the utmost respect for Bach. Because we know what he is and what he means in the history of music. But any 18th century musician would not have been inhibited by that feeling. Handel borrowed to light the fire. Bach was doing the same thing – he was borrowing from his family, other composers, he was doing it throughout his whole career.
“Bach had no inhibition – his purpose was always to sound as idiomatic as possible. He can make some striking transformations, but not always. Sometimes the music can be transcribed as is. It really depends upon the material in his hands. But there’s no reference to ‘authenticity’. That was something invented in the 20th century. The idea of authenticity, of going back to the roots – they were the roots, they just didn’t care. They didn’t have this idea that they can’t touch what we have. For them, music was a living material which they could transform whenever they thought it was needed.”
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The famous pianist Glenn Gould certainly touched what he had – his professional life was bookended by recordings of the Goldberg Variations, the first a bestseller that critics still say are smudged by his unusual fingerprints. Born in Toronto in 1932, Gould was composing and touring before puberty. So young was he when he began his career, that his retirement from public performance at 32 might not be considered early. But his death was. Gould died from a stroke at 50. Before he died, Gould reclusively wrote essays and recorded radio shows. In the years he did perform publicly, his concerts became known for his tics – his humming, his gloves and thick coat (lest he catch a cold), and the same squeaky chair. Beneath his feet, he habitually placed a worn square of carpet. Most memorable, though, was his singular, unabashed flamboyance.
But for Tognetti, myth follows mastery. Gould’s tics didn’t obscure his talent – we’re conscious of them because of it. “He was the great romantic,” Tognetti says. “Throwing himself into it. The mythology is because of the music. With some artists it’s all hype. But Gould was the first great, quirky, romantic pianist with the technique of Horowitz. Mind-blowing. One of the great pianists of all time.”
Today, it’s still hard to avoid Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations when discussing the piece, a bestseller which re-popularised Bach and established Gould’s celebrity. It’s fast – very fast – and played with a “fanatically crisp articulation”. Tognetti tells me that audiences in the past have criticised his own performances of it because they’ve measured it against the only recording they’ve heard: Gould’s.
Labadie and Tognetti are world-class. They’ve become so with talent. With both, an early, tender and inarticulate passion later resolved itself into rarefied skill. But they respectfully disagree on Gould – and other matters. And we, those without their skills, might find pleasure in knowing that music can still remain, even for the globally renowned, a matter of taste and divergent opinions.
“I’ve never been able to get through the whole thing once,” Labadie tells me of Gould’s ‘55 recording of the Variations. “For me, it’s unbelievably fascinating, but it sounds more like Gould than it sounds like Bach. It certainly doesn’t sound like 18th century music. This love of short notes, of hyper-articulation. It doesn’t sound natural. It’s a recreation by someone with an agenda.”
Tognetti says the first Gould recording of the Variations he heard was the later one – the one recorded just months before Gould’s death. “That’s the one I grew up with,” he says. “I gazed first into the beguiling world of Goldberg and Gould, and it was later I heard the ‘55 and thought ‘that sounds too fast’.”
It might be reassuring to know that the bias of a first encounter exists amongst the most talented.
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We love myths of creation. Stories that adorn our most cherished songs. A popular one is Paul McCartney conjuring the melody of “Yesterday” in his sleep, and waking – the melody miraculously retained – to scribble down the corresponding chords under the working title “Scrambled Eggs”. McCartney loves the story and so, I think, do we. Perhaps the story’s popularity owes to our pleasure in contemplating some music as magically conceived – and pleasure in thinking of McCartney as a smiling genius for whom even unconsciousness cannot thwart the Muse.
McCartney charmingly shrugs when telling the story – the musician as grateful servant of inscrutable forces. But the story as told ignores individual intelligence and effort. It ignores the fact that inspiration is often the intuitive, subliminal adoption of things already heard – that talent first passionately immerses itself in others’ work, before creating its own. But do we care? The pleasure of the story remains, but what matters most is the song itself.
The myth of the Goldberg Variations is different: A wealthy patron makes an eccentric commission. The foundation for this story is found in an early biography of Bach, written by Johann Nikolaus Forkel fifty years after his subject’s death. For the existence of the Goldberg Variations, Forkel writes, “we have to thank the instigation of the former Russian ambassador to the electoral court of Saxony, Count Kaiserling, who often stopped in Leipzig and brought there with him the aforementioned Goldberg, in order to have him given musical instruction by Bach. The Count was often ill and had sleepless nights. At such times, Goldberg, who lived in his house, had to spend the night in an antechamber, so as to play for him during his insomnia…
“Once the Count mentioned in Bach’s presence that he would like to have some clavier pieces for Goldberg, which should be of such a smooth and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights. Bach thought himself best able to fulfil this wish by means of Variations, the writing of which he had until then considered an ungrateful task on account of the repeatedly similar harmonic foundation.”
Which is strange: The saintly Bach, who wrote so much music to awaken others to the Glory of God – and whose Variations have, for centuries, dynamically aroused the genius of his various interpreters – employed to put an ailing Count to sleep. The insomnia myth is, in part, about genius servicing a banality; of a historically significant talent deployed to make one rich man sleepy.
For Richard Tognetti, the contrast is amusingly subversive. “My attraction to [this story] is that insomnia is the last thing you’d imagine the great Bach would put his mind to – sending people to sleep. The uber-sophisticates like [veteran Italian conductor] Ricardo Muti – he had a little Euro hissy-fit because he was listed in the Chicago Tribune under the entertainment section. Okay, where do you put the Goldbergs?
“Sure, [Bach says], I’ll write something to send people to sleep. But he can’t deny his own genius doing it. So, we can study every note, analysing it and pulling it apart, but here’s this humble and anti-artistic positioning as to be a bit of a joke. And I love that, I love that dilemma.”
There’s scholarly doubt about it ever happening. But Tognetti laughs mischievously when he says that perhaps “some myths shouldn’t be debunked” – they’re too much fun.
For Labadie, the specifics of the commission hardly matter – the truth of it is in the score. “It’s a fun story. But if this was really effective for insomnia, you’d miss the point,” he says. “I mean, if you really wanted to keep someone awake, you’d play the Goldberg Variations. If you listen to it with interest and awareness of what’s happening, there’s no way you’re going to sleep. But... music can be heard and read on so many different levels.”
Myths blossom around genius; so too debates about its interpretation. But for both Tognetti and Labadie, Bach remains as beguiling as when they first heard him. “What Bach means to me, in a very direct and objective sense, is that he’s the most travelled composer – even though he’s one of the least travelled in a physical sense,” Tognetti says. “He’s travelling around space as a voyager.”
Bernard Labadie shares a quote he loves – even if he remains sceptical of it. “Someone said that Bach was such a complete universe that had he not existed the history of music would have been exactly the same,” he says. “Isn’t that fabulous? But impossible.”