CAMA's Masterseries presents Peter Serkin, piano - Saturday, February 24, 2018, Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, 8PM

composed thirty variations over that bass
line.
There are ten groups of three
variations. In the first nine groups, the
third variation is a canon, in which the
second voice imitates the first voice
strictly. The first canon is “all unisono”
(the second voice enters on the same
note as the first) but the voices enter one
note further apart in each succeeding
canons. So in Variation 6, the first voice
begins on a G and the second voice
enters “alla Seconda” on the A one note
higher. In Variation 9, “Canona alla Terza,”
the first voice begins on a B and the
second voice on the G a third lower, but
the second voice is “inverted”: it ascends
wherever the first voice descends and
vice versa, as if it’s the first voice written
upside down. In every canon but the last,
Variation 27, the voices imitating each
other in canon are accompanied by a
freely composed bass line. This sort of
composition is a something of a game
between the composer and the player
looking the score (and the game could
get weird: composers were fond of puzzle
canons, in which they might write one
line and let the player figure out that the
second voice is the first one upside down
and backwards, perhaps with the aid of a
cryptic verbal hint) so the concert listener
hearing it for the first time, or the tenth, is
unlikely to figure out what the rules are.
Some variations, typically the second in
the group of three, are free counterpoint
of the sort that Bach elsewhere called a
two-part invention. Bach’s contemporaries
would have heard dance rhythms in some
variations, such as the gigue in Variation 11
and the minuet in Variation 19.
Variation 10 is a short fugue. Variation
16 is a full-blown French Overture, with a
stately pompous opening leading to a fugal
second section.
Variation 30, the only third variation
that is not a canon, is a quodlibet, in which
at least three folk songs (there could be
more; modern scholars have not been
able to identify all the melodic strains)
superimposed on each other. This is both
a compositional stunt and the innest of
in jokes. Forkel wrote that the Bach and
his relatives had annual family reunions
devoted to music, in which they would start
by singing hymns, move on to songs that
were “partly comic and partly naughty,” and
then finally improvise quodlibets.
Some of the variations feature more
purely virtuosic showing off than we’re used
to getting from Bach, and it’s so hard not
to hear the influence of Domenico Scarlatti
in the scampering and hand-crossings in
Variations 14, 20, 23 26 and 28 that some
Bach scholars assume Bach had studied
Scarlatti’s 30 Essercizi, the only publication of
Scarlatti’s harpsichord music during Bach’s
(or Scarlatti’s) lifetime. It came out in 1738,
which meant that Bach would have had to
get his hands on it soon after it came out.
There is no actual evidence that he did, but
Bach was an avid devourer of music by any
composer he thought he might learn from.
It would have entirely in character for him to
immerse himself in the latest cutting-edge
keyboard music and reflect that immersion
in his epic essay of keyboard possibilities. n
©2018, Howard Posner
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