ExclusiveBach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 - 16 - Variatio 15 a 1 Clav. Canone alla Quinta

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Johann Sebastian Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 - 16 - Variatio 15 a 1 Clav. Canone alla Quinta. This beautiful piece was played by Kimiko Ishizaka. It has Creative Commons license (PDM 1.0 DEED, Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

"In the last decade of his life, Bach was almost obsessively preoccupied with the art of the canon - a tendency that was already evident in the canonic part-writing of his late cantatas from the 1730s. This was followed by the nine canons of the Goldberg Variations, the four canons of the Art of Fugue, the ten canons of the Musical Offering, the canonic changes on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her and a canon work that was only rediscovered in his hand copy of the Goldberg Variations: 14 canons on the first eight fundamental notes of the Aria. Even after completing the nine harpsichord canons of his variations, Bach could not let go of the eight bass notes in question, so that he treated them according to all the rules of the art in this series of 14 canons.

The nine canons of the Goldberg Variations are of course longer and more elaborate than the later ones, as they deal with the entire 32 bars of the aria and not just its first eight bass notes. In addition, each of the canons in the variations is an idiomatic harpsichord piece, by no means an abstractly conceived canon. In the headings, however, Bach indicated what kind of canon it was, i.e. at what interval the voices follow each other. This distance increases gradually from canon to canon: from the canon in unison (all'unisono) to canons in the intervals of the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and octave to the canon in the ninth. The aforementioned quodlibet is located where one would expect the canon in the decimal.

Anyone who has ever composed or sung a canon knows how difficult the genre is. Canons, as they are usually sung in choir rehearsals, church services or in social gatherings, are generally limited to the simple intervals of the unison and the octave. Canons in other intervals are much more difficult, even those in the consonant intervals of the third, fifth and sixth, but even more so those in the dissonant intervals of the second, fourth, seventh and ninth. Bach's method is therefore already daring in itself and becomes all the more so as all canons except the last are in three voices: The upper voice and middle voice follow each other in the canon, while the bass plays a free and often strongly agitated ground voice that interprets the harmonies of the upper voices. The two canon parts often swap roles in the course of a movement, so that sometimes the upper part leads, sometimes the lower part. This also changes the position of the canon interval: the fourth canon, for example, begins as a canon in the lower fourth (the upper voice leads), only to become a canon in the upper fourth in the second part (the lower voice leads). It is also a mirror canon, so that all the intervals of the canon melody in the first voice are mirrored in the second. All of this takes place within the immovable harmonic and formal framework of the aria, as each canon is also a variation on the theme.

By dividing the variations into ten groups of three and allowing the canons to ascend cyclically from unison to ninth at the end of each group, Bach gave the work a clear cyclical structure based on intensification. In view of the final variations from the 25th onwards, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that this is a truly monumental progression. Admittedly, some of the variations, especially among the middle ones of each group (the quasi-etudes), seem bizarre, so that one should not take all of Bach's technical finesse seriously. Bach's intention to combine capricious ideas into a collage is too clear. The humorous conclusion of the whole fits in with this: The evasion of the decimal canon to a quodlibet is nothing short of a tangible Bachian joke. With a smile on his lips, the Thomaskantor proves that three of the most popular Central German folk songs can be combined contrapuntally with each other and with the bass of the aria!"
Source: www.kammermusikfuehrer.de/

The video was captured by Simone Schlegel and edited by Wenjing Ma. (And no, I don't know why the river is coloured like that...)






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