Walt Whitman contained multitudes. JS Bach had variations. So do we all. They seem to be infinite, but they aren’t. It’s all finite. We collect our variations and then move on. We wake, we sleep, the variations proliferate. Sometimes it’s too much.
I’m 51, which seems old to my young friends and young to my older friends. If I were truly middle aged, I’d make it to 102. Jimmy Carter doesn’t seem to be having a fabulous time getting there. So, this is it. Now. The variations get more complicated when the thing we think we want is not the thing we need, or even what we can handle. Major turns to minor and back—they even go off the grid of G major—and whatever we do, they are ahead of us.
There is a design to it all, and we can’t fully grasp it no matter how much we listen. We are lucky to get the hem of the garment.
If we believe the story, a 14-year-old kid named Goldberg gave J.S. Bach the biggest commission of his life to write the cure for insomnia. We only have a handful of facts about Bach’s life. Mozart got Amadeus, Beethoven got Immortal Beloved. There is no Bach movie. The music is cinematic. Who knows about the person who made it? He was a rector, he fathered 20 kids and some survived, and we have the music, which means something different to us than it must have meant for him, but we have no idea. The Goldberg Variations was considered minor clavichord repertoire until 22-year-old Glenn Gould, who had been studying it since adolescence, made a best-selling album of it on this pianoforte contraption when the LP was new technology. The sound became lucid, and you could cut it in half: Side One, Side Two. Bach left no indications on his scores, certainly no guide for an instrument that was made after his time. And yet Bach is also after his time. The variations are a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.
Before benzos, this was what the doctor ordered. There were innocent days when Baroque piano could have done the trick for me, but they keep me up. It speeds up at the fifth variation. You are still in and around the G Major scale, but life is getting faster and more demanding.