Watching a capacity crowd in London’s Royal Festival Hall standing to cheer Víkingur Ólafsson’s magisterial performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, I doubt I was the only person who felt the prickle of tears. The Icelandic pianist, who is devoting his entire 2023–24 season to this work, with 88-odd performances around the globe, seemed to have carried us on a journey not only through the genius of JS Bach but through life itself.
Ólafsson, too, found the ovation moving. “Don’t you wish Bach had seen this?” he reflects, via a video call from Berlin. “He wrote this piece in 1741 and it’s like a message in a bottle. Who’s going to receive it? What were his hopes? Few people at the time would have been able to perform at that technical level, and by then nobody cared for canons, fugues and toccatas.
“How did it feel to write history’s greatest keyboard work, to go that high and that far, yet have no one to communicate it to? But here we are, at the Berlin Philharmonie and the Southbank Centre, and it’s packed. People are going crazy for his music in 2023.” Ólafsson’s performance at Seoul on 15th December will be livestreamed on STAGE+ to a huge audience around the world.
Ólafsson terms his Goldberg year “a workaholic’s sabbatical”. “It’s my time away from all the big organisations, the wonderful orchestras and conductors, the diversity of repertoire and the great composers I get to work with,” he says. “All these things are central to my life – I’ll come back next year, and John Adams is writing me a new concerto. But this is my chance to be alone with my suitcase and Bach.
“On another level, I want to challenge myself. I think the point of the Goldberg Variations is to show how much variety you can draw from the simple chord progression of the aria. I want to see how far I can take it, as a performer. How open is it to redefining interpretations, from concert to concert, from month to month?
“This piece changes with us, like the seasons and the years. It grows with us, through every new generation and every performer. It’s always a mirror to modernity. I wanted to see in 88 concerts how it would affect me as a musician. It’s almost like a cleansing process: it’s the purest form of musical expression and of beauty and diversity. I hope I will come out stronger from it.”
To him, the 80-minute span of Aria and 30 variations can be read as a voyage through the human condition. “You can enjoy the piece in purely abstract terms, but you could easily imagine it as a life cycle, in which the aria is an ode to birth, the beginning of something profoundly beautiful. The first 14 variations, all in G major, could be a happy, carefree childhood, until Variation 15, when he turns light into shadow and goes into G minor. It’s like the first time tragedy hits us.”
Halfway through, Bach effects a fresh start with no. 16, a French Overture: it indicates a new beginning in every sense. “You bounce back, as we have to in life,” Ólafsson says. “You experience your first great loss, but you find pleasure, happiness, joy and inspiration before the next G minor variation, no. 21, arrives.
“But I think the real masterstroke, structurally, is no. 25.” Nicknamed the “Black Pearl”, this is the variations’ dark heart. “It’s about ten minutes long, far longer than any of the others. From a structural perspective, the emotional impact of that imbalance on the audience is profound. If he had tried to place this variation earlier, we simply would not be ready for it.
“You can read it as a profound loss: something on a fundamental human level, like losing your mother. Yet even after that, you bounce back again. The hero returns, with the flourish of the last variations, to come home to his roots, to folk music, to society. The Quodlibet, Variation 30, evokes the idea of being together as a family, singing and improvising counterpoint, as the Bachs would do, using two folk tunes of the day. One is a popular song that we still have in Iceland. My son’s singing it in kindergarten!”
“For Bach, the only way to finish his quest is to bring more people into the act of performing. And for me, this is when I become aware of the audience again. When you’re playing the Variations, regardless of the situation, you are alone with the music and the piano; you don’t feel people’s presence. But in the Quodlibet, suddenly you become a part of the hall in a different way. It brings you back to your roots, your family, your home.
“And then the ultimate home: the return of the Aria. It seems to restart the whole cycle and gives you a sense of eternity. It feels like the one constant within an unstable universe. It’s been playing somewhere deep the whole time; we haven’t been aware of it because of the unbelievable variety that Bach draws from it. But it’s there, even when you stop playing. Like life, it’s also going to continue when we don’t. And that is the tragedy of the aria’s return; that’s why I fear the silence afterwards, because I know it will go on, but I won’t. And that is life itself. You want to hold on to it, but you can’t. It’s one of the most touching moments in all keyboard music.”
Performing the Goldberg Variations on the modern piano, however, is far from a straightforward task: it was written for a two-manual harpsichord. It’s not only a matter of managing the virtuoso writing on one keyboard instead, but also about how far to push the instrument in a work created for a very different touch, sound and dynamic range. “I think we should have Steinway & Sons make a two-manual concert grand! Why not?” Ólafsson says.
“The Goldberg Variations are very polyphonic and I try to separate those voices into individual entities. It’s almost like a puppet theatre: you’re controlling the characters and their dialogue. On the modern piano with all its dynamics, you can push that machine infinitely. I think the dynamic range in the polyphony can only clarify and strengthen the texture.
“I love the harpsichord: I play it and I love Ralph Kirkpatrick’s recordings, so I will never criticise the instrument. But in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, for instance, you expect every string player in the orchestra to play with plenty of dynamic variety to help define the structure. That’s one thing that we should do here on the piano. In landscape paintings from the 18th or 19th centuries, you would see many different dimensions, with the foreground, the background and everything in between. That’s how I think of sound and that’s what you can do with polyphony on the piano. You have infinite variety at your disposal.”
To anyone who insists that the piano is the “wrong” instrument, Ólafsson remarks, “I would say that I love you more than you love me! I love the early music community, and I’ve learned so much from it. But I think of historically informed performance practice slightly differently. The question is, where do you draw the line? When does that history stop? To be historically informed is also to know the recorded history by Wanda Landowska, Glenn Gould, András Schiff, Grigory Sokolov... And you can read about the harpsichord, but you can also read about the development of the piano and Bach’s interest in instrument making. To be historically informed doesn’t mean stopping in 1741 or 1750. It continues up to today.”
Performance situations can affect the way Ólafsson plays, and the December livestream is no exception: “There’s something extra when you know that people are tuning in. The fact that people are there with you, even while they’re not, means a lot to me. There’s a different feeling when you play in your living room from when you’re playing at the Royal Festival Hall; for streaming there’s another layer besides.
“But a livestream can be humbling, because there’s no such thing as a perfect performance. You can’t expect to achieve your ideal in every second of those 80 minutes, so you have to accept yourself with all your weaknesses. It’s not always easy.”
Meanwhile, the work casts a unique spell that maintains its intimacy, no matter the setting. “It almost creates its own environment; people are brought into it, gravitating towards it. That’s Bach’s message. It’s unbelievable, it’s paradoxical, but it happens over and over again.
“I think the Odyssey of this piece makes people go on their own internal voyage, especially in the minor variations. Often they come to CD signings afterwards and tell me they had tears in their eyes, because something made them relive events in their own lives. It’s hugely personal. Every one of them is in their own space, yet we’re all together in this huge experience, listening. It’s an unbelievable combination of the individual and the communal. And no one does that better than Bach.”
Víkingur Ólafsson performs the Goldberg Variations live from Seoul on STAGE+ on 15th December (available on demand until 30th June 2025), as part of Deutsche Grammophon’s 125th Anniversary. STAGE+ is the video and audio streaming service for classical music.
This article was sponsored by Deutsche Grammophon.
Minor updates were made to this article in June 2024.
