Volume 20 Issue 1 - September 2014

DISCOVERIES | RECORDINGS REVIEWEDWhat I Did On My Summer VacationDAVID OLDSIt all began as I was registering for an online service and was asked the security question “Who is your favourite author?” I realized that theanswer has not changed in about 35 years since I first read William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (I hope this admission will not leave me vulnerableto identity theft!) which led to a re-reading of his final work, Agapē Agape. And there my story begins...With Gaddis’ fixation on mechanicalreproduction (specifically the invention ofthe player piano) and the ways technologychanged the perception and availability ofart in the 20th century, in particular thephenomenon of Glenn Gould and Gould’swish to “eliminate the middleman andbecome [one with] the Steinway,” the stagewas set for my wonderful summer’s journey.It began with The Loser, Thomas Bernhard’saccount of a fictional Glenn Gould’s studiesin Salzburg with Vladimir Horowitz, and thedevastating effects his presence (and his interpretationof the Goldberg Variations) had ontwo fellow students, the unnamed narratorand the character Wertheimer, who abandonedpromising solo careers and were ultimatelydestroyed by the contact (Wertheimer infact a suicide). Evidently Gaddis was readingBernhard toward the end of his life and it wasthere he found the premise of Gould wantingto become the piano.It was about this timethat I realized that abook which had arrivedat The WholeNote afew months earlier andwhich I had browsedbut put down as beingtoo dry and academic,The Musical Novelby Emily Petermann(Camden House 978-1-57113-592-6), mightprovide some insightsand inspiration after all.I still found it hard going – with its use ofsuch unfamiliar words as inter-, intra- andmulti-medial, poiesis and palimsestuous (asopposed to palimsestic, she explains), allof which I was able to make out from theirroots and context but which I notice set offspell-check alarms – and ended up focussingon Chapter 5: “Structural Patterns inNovels Based on the Goldberg Variations.” Ofthe four books analyzed – Gabriel Josipovici’sGoldberg: Variations; Nancy Huston’sThe Goldberg Variations; Rachel Cusk’sBradshaw Variations and Richard Powers’Gold Bug Variations – I had read (severaltimes) all but the Cusk. The inclusion of thislatter was in itself worth the effort of perseveringwith Petermann’s thesis.I took a break from the scholarly tometo (re)read each of the books in question.Reading them all together, interspersed with anumber of recordings of the namesake, occupiedme for most of a month and providedsome delightful moments and revelations.Having now gone back to The Musical Novelto read Chapter 6 and the Conclusion hasalso furnished a number of explanations andclarifications, both about the novels in questionand the structure of Bach’s masterpiece.An example of the former is Cusk’s inclusionof a narrator-less chapter writtenentirely in dialogue without commentary(shades of Gaddis, although Cusk’s speakersare identified) which stuck in the craw ofat least one reviewer as being non-sequiturialand annoying for its lack of context.Petermann points out that the chapter inquestion is parallel to Bach’s Variation XXVIIin the structure of the book and is a literaryrepresentation of this “canon at the ninth,”which involves just two voices without the“commentary” of the bass line present in allof the other variations. So there is the contextwhich the reviewer found lacking. LikewisePetermann explores the unique A-B structureof Variation XVI, the midpoint of Bach’s cycle,and relates it to several of the literary works,most notably the Josipovici. In an extension ofthe legend of the origin of another of Bach’smasterpieces, The Musical Offering, Josipovicirecasts the story of Bach’s musical meetingwith Frederick the Great to be Goldberg’s –a writer rather than a harpsichordist in thisnovel – literary joust with King George III andsubsequent reworking of the King’s themeinto “seven tiny tales” and a longer three-partcautionary story. Other insights abound…Bach provided the title Clavierübung(keyboard study) consisting of an Aria withDiverse Variations for the Harpsichord withTwo Manuals Composed for Music Lovers,to Refresh their Spirits. Johann NikolausForkel, in the first biography of Bach writtensome six decades after the composer’s death,provided a background story from which thename we now associate with the work originated.Forkel tells us that Baron von Keiserling,an insomniac who employed a young harpsichordplayer named Goldberg to play himsoothing and entertaining music at nightfrom an adjoining room to help him sleep, orat least deal with his sleeplessness, commissionedBach to write a set of suitable piecesfor Goldberg to play. That story has long sincebeen debunked, as listening to some of themore rambunctious variations might suggest,but the myth has continued to entice us formore than two centuries.The recordings Irevisited duringthis extensiveimmersionin the GoldbergVariations wereof course GlennGould’s seminal 1955and ultimate 1981versions (in a 2002three-CD commemorativepackage that includesan extended conversation between Gouldand music critic Tim Page, SONY S3K 87703),plus Luc Beauséjour’s harpsichord rendition(Analekta fleur de lys FL 2 3132), DmitriSitkovetsky’s string trio arrangement withSitkovetsky, Gérard Causé and Misha Maisky(Orfeo C 138 851 A, but you might choosea Canadian recording of the same arrangementwith Jonathan Crow, Douglas McNabneyand Matt Haimowitz on Oxingale OX2014,reviewed by Terry Robbins in the March 2009WholeNote) and Bernard Labadie’s stringorchestra version with Les Violons du Roy(Dorian xCD-90281), each of which bringsvery different aspects of the work to light andall of which I would recommend withouthesitation. As I would the literary titlesmentioned above.It was a newrecording, BachGoldberg Variationsfor Two Pianos,that drew myparticular attentionhowever. EvidentlyJoseph Rheinberger(1839-1901)felt that the original 1741 solo keyboard(two-manual harpsichord) work wouldprovide enough material to keep two pianistsbusy and in 1883 made an arrangementfor two pianos in which the liner notestell us he “took substantial liberties withBach’s original voicing, doubling melodiesand fleshing out harmonies as he saw fit…[leaving] an unmistakably Romantic impressionon the work.” Thirty years later MaxReger “smoothed out a few of the [remaining]rough edges” of Rheinberger’s adaptationand published the version recorded here in awonderful performance by Nina Schumannand Luis Magalhães (TwoPianists RecordsTP1039213). It is this “Romantic” version for66 | September 1, 2014 – October 7, 2014 thewholenote.com