The Goldberg Variations ("Aria with Diverse Variations," BWV 988) is one of the summits of Johann Sebastian Bach's works for harpsichord. The cycle was published as the fourth in the series of Keyboard Exercises in 1741 by Bach's publisher and friend Balthasar Schmid in Nuremberg.
While the piece was considered an exercise in Bach's time, in the 20th century the genius's great work became universally recognized. Numerous musicological studies have been devoted to this fascinating, mysterious, symbolic composition; some of the world's best pianists have made it part of their repertoire offering their renditions of the musical material.
The variations were commissioned by Count Hermann Carl von Keyserling and had its name after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a young virtuoso and Keyserling's personal harpsichordist who performed the variations for the count. Earlier, in the 1730s, the count, a connoisseur of arts, a Russian envoy to Dresden and a president of the Imperial Academy of Science, obtained the post of court Kapellmeister for Bach. The composer wrote his variations as a musical tribute to his benefactor.
Maria Veniaminovna Yudina (1899 – 1970) performed the Goldberg Variations in concert for the first time in October 1967, three years before her death. It was composer and harpsichordist Andrey Volkonsky who offered her to turn to this work. Then, in January 1968, her rendition was recorded on Firma Melodiya.
Her ascetic, brilliantly simple and deep performance of the great composer's work is exceptionally convincing. The key to Yudina's religious interpretation of the Goldberg Variations can be found among her notes she made on the margins of the clavier. The pianist played Bach with "the Gospel in my hands" as she remarked. Anatoly Kuznetsov who was Yudina's biographer wrote: "Reading Maria Yudina's notes, one gets evidence that Yudina's religious enlightenment matched Bach's spiritual impulses demonstrating inner affinity of different confessions. Yudina found the equivalents that bring us "into the world of true realizations" she dreamt of when she worked with translators. Yudina's finds are congenial to the composer's concept, although Bach probably never thought of a commentary of this kind."
