J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations Early Music Days

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

The story fixed to the Goldberg Variations — that Bach wrote them so a sleepless count could have something played through the night by his young harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg — is one scholars have long doubted. But it stuck, and it handed the work the name it still carries. The Greek National Opera programs it on 27 November as part of Early Music Days, its nine-concert November festival at the SNFCC.

Bach published the music in 1741 as the fourth part of his Clavier-Übung: an aria — a slow sarabande — followed by thirty variations, and then the aria again, unchanged, at the end. The design underneath is strict. Every third variation is a canon, and the canons climb by interval, from a canon at the unison up to one at the ninth. The variation before the close abandons the scheme for a quodlibet, stitching popular tunes of the day over the bass. Seventy-odd minutes later the opening aria returns, and the ear hears it differently for everything that has passed.

Bach wrote the variations for a harpsichord with two manuals — the hand-crossing numbers need two keyboards to keep ten fingers from colliding, a problem the modern piano forces a player to solve by other means. That question of the right instrument is the whole premise of Early Music Days, which reads the repertoire through documented period practice rather than modern default. The festival anchors the Alternative Stage's tenth-anniversary season.

The Alternative Stage is a black box with telescopic seating and acoustic curtains that retune it for each production — a room that can be set intimate for a solo keyboard, where a single line has to hold the hall for over an hour with no orchestra to hide behind. This is the later of two Early Music Days concerts in the hall that night; a Brahms folk-song recital precedes it at 18:00.

The Goldberg draws people who know it — who feel a canon lock into place, who wait for the quodlibet, who come for the return of the aria at the close. It also rewards a first hearing: the shape is audible even when the counterpoint is not. Seventy-five uninterrupted minutes ask for concentration, and the room is built to sustain it.

If you want variety across an evening — several works, a shifting stage — this is a single, unbroken structure that asks you to stay inside it. But if you want to follow one of the most complete pieces of musical architecture Bach left, played in a festival built to get its instrument and manner right, this is the night.

The SNFCC is on the Kallithea coast, away from the metro: the free SNFCC shuttle runs from Syntagma via Syngrou-Fix, and the Athens tram from Syntagma reaches it in about thirty minutes, then a walk across the park to the Opera building. Seated and ticketed through the Greek National Opera, doors before the 20:30 start.

Thirty variations, a run of hand-crossing canons, and one aria that leaves and comes back — a single sitting, once this November.