J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, Orion Weiss, Piano

Описание: January 2021, an empty Merkin Hall, NYC
Video by Alessio Romano

The Goldberg Variations were supposed to be a cure for insomnia, so the (probably apocryphal) story goes. Apocryphal or not, this has it backwards. They are too intensely interesting to put anyone to sleep. Rather, they work amazingly – if listened to late on a torrid summer night – as an alternative to insomnia. This music soothes the harried and wakeful soul, grants richness and peace to the haze of the wee hours.

It's now almost 300 years since the composition of the Goldberg Variations, midsummer 2022, and we still can't get to sleep. Our collective unconscious is bleary eyed, strung out, exhausted. When will rest come, when will peace follow? Are we doomed to run from wolves forever?

The need for the Goldbergs, in all their non-pharmaceutical power, is greater than ever.

The dialogues of the ever-widening canons, the variety of styles and dances, the complexity of the polyphony, the genius of Bach's endless invention, all those things are musical answers to the bigger worries that keep us up.

This masterpiece describes, in all but words, the infinite order that creation can make out of chaos. This is reassuring, stabilizing, more than anything tangible or expressible could possibly be.

In a world that sometimes seems like Chaotic Variations on a Theme of Misfortune, here is a theme as perfect as nature or divinity, followed by 30 steps, up, and up, towards hope and certainty.