I love this variation. It's so jaunty! (Have I called it jaunty yet?) I also think it will be a nice recovery piece after that beast of a canon. Working a half at a time, I expect I'll get this one down much faster. In the meantime, I've been starting to do some deeper reading about the Goldberg Variations, and I'd like to start sharing some of that knowledge with you as it comes up. First though, an update on Maurice! He was working really hard holding up the lamp, but the lamp was sideways and he didn't feel good about his work. Together we found a more suitable solution:
Beethoven doesn't approve, but he doesn't really approve of much anyway. Maurice is feeling useful but less stressed, and there's no more rattling! Win-win.
As it turns out, scholars seem to think of the variations as *really* starting with Variation 3. There's some debate about whether Bach even wrote the Aria himself, or "borrowed" it, but I guess most people think he wrote it. But Variation 3 is the first of 9 canons, and it's a canon in unison. That means that there is a leading voice and a following voice, and they both start on the same note (the unison). Variation 6 is another canon, this time at the second (the follower starts up one step from the leader), and so on up the line. Also apparently the canons are considered by many to be the best part of this whole thing. This suggests the time spent on Variation 3 was worth it!
After each canon comes the 'real' variations, which are written in a wide range of styles. I'm told that listeners of his day would have recognized them as wildly different styles; I don't know if that means hip-hop vs ambient nowadays, but I bet it's at least on the level of rockabilly vs metal. Variation 4 is (I think) a toccata, a kind of dance. The name sounds jaunty too!
No comments:
Post a Comment