Glenn Gould - Part 2 – The 1981 ‘Goldberg Variations’ Recording

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

This episode is the second of two featuring the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. And I hope you will excuse me for what could easily be construed as laziness…. Because I am just  going to play you one piece of music. If you want a sense of Gould’s life and musical achievements… and I hope a persuasive argument as to why he is the first instrumentalist featured in an entire Classical For Everyone episode then can I recommend you listen to the previous episode before this one.

But, if you are happy just to listen to his 1981 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ after a pretty brief introduction… then please keep listening. And because I explained the meaning of the title in the previous episode I will keep that detail for after I have played you the music.

But there are a couple of introductory things worth mentioning. ‘The Goldberg Variations’ was the only work that Gould recorded twice. Now, he died only about a year after this recording so it’s not possible to say that he would not have re-recorded other works… but there is something of a good bit of dramatic plotting that the work that took him from quirky prodigy to global star in 1955 was the one he returned to in the final year of his life.

When interviewed about why re-record it Gould said.

I wasn't motivated to do it until rather recently, when it occurred to me, on one of my rare re-listenings to that early recording, that it was very nice, but that it was perhaps a little bit like thirty very interesting but somewhat independent-minded pieces, going their own way.

As far as I can tell that quote comes from the film the musician and documentarian Bruno Monsaingeon made about the recording… which is a remarkable complement to the recording.

Alright. Time for the music. This is Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. It begins with an aria, or song; which is the theme from which 30 variations are created. For this Bach takes the bass line pattern from this opening aria and uses it as the skeleton for all 30 variations, creating entirely different melodies and characters while keeping the same underlying harmonic structure. And then, in what I think is a moment of great beauty, Bach concludes by reprising the aria, the song from the beginning of the piece. I hope you enjoy it. It is about 52 minutes long. And it starts pretty quietly. Here is Glenn Gould.

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That was Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ which was published in 1741.  

That really is it for this episode but for those who missed the previous episode I’m going to repeat a bit of information about the piece. The title in particular raises a couple of questions I’ll try to very briefly cover. Who was this Goldberg the piece came to be named after? Johann Gottlieb Goldberg was a virtuoso keyboard player in the employ of one Count Hermann von Keyserling and apparently briefly a student of Bach’s. The story, written down 60 years after Bach’s death, is that the Count commissioned the piece for Goldberg to play on the nights the Count couldn’t sleep. And from that story, whether fiction or fact… and no one’s quite sure… came the first part of the name… Goldberg.

Now, what does the term ‘variations’ mean?
Well, there is an interesting analogy with jazz… which is largely improvised music. If you are improvising as a group you generally want to have an agreed melody or theme that you are basing your improvisations on. For example the 1930’s song ‘All The Things You Are’ has been recorded by dozens and dozens of jazz players. And these are not copies of the song. The song is the basis for largely improvised versions. And you could say each one is a ‘variation’ on the original song.

Now in classical music the idea of improvising over a known melodic or harmonic structure… of making variations on a theme… goes back over five centuries. But by Bach’s time, the early 1700s, composers had also adopted it as a compositional device. The completed pieces felt like they were a set of improvisations based on a theme… but they were fully composed… they were written down… and they were published. The form of ‘theme and variations’ went on to take a central position in western classical music… especially if the composer wanted to display their imaginative skills. And the ‘Goldberg Variations’ is one of the best known and best regarded. And whilst there had been a handful of recordings before Glenn Gould’s, it was his from 1955 that resurrected it. Many people prefer it to the one I played you in this episode but for me the 1981 version has an extra depth of feeling. 

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than forty or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.