Aria with 30 Variations

After “Count Kaiserling’s Variations,” 1741

Aria

Mr. Bach has begun to play a little tune in G. It is very much like walking through a wood where there are twisty roots and old pieces of furniture. You can stop and rest in the easy chairs or climb into the drawers of the large dressers. Some have carved figures attached to them. At night, they prowl around and startle the owls.
Do you climb over that divan, or do you push through the rhododendron bushes? This little tune is called “Aria” (which means “song” in Italian). Johann played this song first in his own head and then touched the keyboard. He wrote down the notes to be sure he remembered it correctly. And now, it’s possible to follow him through that trail in the woods.
In the many thousands of times this piece has been played and heard (thousands of thousands), the woods have never been the same. At the end of this song, the theme for all the variations to follow will play again. There’s a chair, a simple chair with a bent back. Everyone sees a chair, but not the same one. We sit, each of us, down. Some will rest longer than others.
The mysterious forest falls away. It does not darken so much as glow. What does the music say? I am an underpinning. I am slow and filling. This is the light under the sea –– here, all the sound remains and fills –– that which has gone before and that which is coming. A slow descent, then, like mountains that have been weathered into hills, and the sea has become a cloud, and we sail again, hearing where we have been.

Variation 1 a 1 Clav.

This one is quite lively. Two squirrels are chasing each other up and down the trunks of the trees. Under all those sixteenth notes, the bass notes follow the same descending pattern, measure by measure, that we heard long ago, in the Aria. In this rushing piece, the left hand speaks to the right hand, but the right hand will have none of it, leaps over the left, and then, we’ve plopped ourselves in a chair. There’s hardly time to take a breath, but there are breaths and breaths. This breath is like a crack in time, taken and not taken.
In the listening mind, then, this physical delight, a shape playing itself. Music says this, and the mind hears, then plays.
Then, we’ve begun again, and it’s upside down –– we’re going where we haven’t been, taking exactly the same steps in exactly the other direction. The trees flash by like a good train ride. We pass by the backs of houses and see people at their lives with yellow lights and shirtsleeves and ceiling fans. Johann didn’t have a ceiling fan, but he heard this music first. He’s decided near the end to stop the juggling and trading between his hands, and the right runs away from the left, who can only sing along until the two animals bump to a stop in the station. Everybody’s out of breath. It’s a good thing we don’t have to breathe.

Variation 2 a 1 Clav.

There’s a call some bird makes –– probably the bird that nests in juniper trees. It’s a simple call, two notes, an upward gesture, interval of a fourth, the same as the theme of the last movement of Brahm’s first symphony. But Johann hasn’t heard that theme; he’s hearing the bird –– first one, then a second –– and they trail behind them more of the sixteenths we heard in Variation 1. But now we’re in a measure of two rather than three.
What I sang before, I’ll sing again –– just as it is impossible to see only a single star in a clear night sky, the call coming can be heard before you hear it.
What’s the difference between two and three? For one thing, there are three parts in this piece –– two birds and a bass. The birds are flashing in the trees, and the bass is a cat running under. You can be the cat, or you can be the birds. But I only have two hands. Then be one ear. One ear like a lake, and all the fish that swim there are swimming. Around and around. But what happened to the birds? The fish ate them.

Variation 3 a 1 Clav.

Cannone all’ Unisuono

A cannon at the unison: I’m telling a story about the animals in the mysterious forest, and then I begin telling the same story again. Now, I’m mixing these wood wurms (rather like a cross between a dragon and a caterpillar) and unicorns. There’s also in this wood a creature called a “Bonnacon.” His horns are so twisted they have become mere decorations. But he is not helpless, this Bonnacon. This creature (and we have Pliny’s word on the subject) can project his dung the length of three jugera (perhaps one-hundred feet), and it is like molten lava. Do not trip on the sleeping unicorn and wake the Bonacon. On Tuesdays, he will flee. But what day is this? He is stamping his feet and backing toward us. The wood wurms are oozing away. (The wood is glittering.) Underneath our feet, leaves and acorns mold together. Salamanders stew about.
The Bonnacon is motionless. The Bonnacon is . . . oh, do not say the word. Cannon at the unison.

Variation 4 a 1 Clav.

Johann is stabbing his triplets. His fingernails are clicking. One grand flight. One grand flight. Johann is proud of his Hass harpsichord with its sixteen-foot stops. Music must have fundament. And he is proud of his one-handed clock, house proud. Time has a way, time’s way, of opening its door, through which we pass. In triplets. Four parts passing. Each bar a second, but there is no hand for seconds on the clock. Only here beneath your fingers. The music does not know the note, but the note makes the music. The moving and the moving of the moving. In the key of sun, of pigeons, clouds, stars released from night. And over that sixteen-foot G, the fourth C bounces up from A on its way to B (heart-piercing third), and F sharp slides up to G –– the sun has risen.

Variation 5 a 1 ovvero 2 Clav.

What if the firing of the neurons has no meaning? We can hear the passing of quarters and eighths, but the sixteenths are a sheen –– yet, fingers move the keys, and the received sounds together fall into the same pattern in the brain. What if meaning has no meaning?
The music may be learned slowly, note by note, avoiding wrong turns. Stop and think –– the music waits. But the neurons are busy being random, made up themselves of even finer stuff, even more determined to be not determined. Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Then, another note. Another. Fingers can take back their tempo. Somewhere in the brain, that 90-mph fastball is letting go. Fingers letting go.
We do not think. We do not hear. We do not play. Playing plays, and hearing hears, and we, not thinking, are the thoughts of thoughts. A stream then, falling among stones, stones thinking their sodden stone thoughts while the stream streams under its damp breath. Moss is listening. The falls plunge –– all this caused but not caring about the cause. In G.

Variation 6 a 1 Clav.

Cannone alla Seconda

In the mysterious forest, then, steps stealthily the Manticore, and in his track, one step behind, his mate. Manticore with man’s face and lion’s body, tail of scorpion, trailing then rising,vine-like. Deep the mysterious forest falls, dark the forest darkens, like the maw of the Manticore, his three rows of teeth, his stingers soaked in poison.
Twining about itself, the bass finds his pace –– he and his mate are one step apart and one measure. A measure then –– two hands cupped in water? A scale –– that leaf broken from the dragon scratching himself on tree trunks? Some scales float up like ashes. Some fall into the moss, where now they glint at passing claws –– the Manticores, each the other–– only time tells them how much to part.
Mysterious stew of vines and paths. Dark the stones hiding there. Hard the soft steps growing faint. Now their tails wave only over rhododendron thick with mystery. Cry dark. Chant to an end. The wood listens.

Variation 7 a 1 ovvero 2 Clav.

al tempo di Giga

Is it not the rhythm of the siciliano, Herr Johann? I ask the great man as we sit with our mugs of beer.
No. The tempo of the Giga, he replies, and he knocks my knuckles with his walking stick.
Ouch! I cry, not from the blow (which was almost kindly) but from the bite of a Succarath, a tiny lizard shaped like the Manticore.
Out the window with you. Back into the woods. Now, the maestro sits at his grand harpsichord, staring at the keyboards. Finally. Finally. Finally. No, that’s not it. Not it at all. Holiday, holiday. More like it.
What’s the word, he asks me, for this? A scoop of scale, so fast, only the last sounds in my ears, among all that ringing, those tree frogs hopping about the furniture.
There’s no word for it. Nothing goes that fast.
Fingers then, he says. Slow down the birds. Here! He’s written it. Four thirty-seconds, a dotted eighth, sixteen, and an eighth. And an eighth. And an eighth. That’s it!

Variation 8 a 2 Clav

Bird furniture. Now the rain is steady, and the trees endure. Descending steps, G, F sharp, E, and D spell out the chords of G, D, e minor, and G. The counterpoint spells the scale (each branch a short flutter lower), but the chords follow other rules, tonic, dominant, triad on the VI, and tonic –– all under that earth-dissolving rain of sixteenths. No stately shapes of rhythm here –– two voices trading keyboards. The birds huddle in the branching branches, and close by, a large drop is an item of which no one sings. Under a great gray cloud, the sun makes no sound. Rain is all bones, hanging from the Earth because there is no down. And the leaves, off-shaken, cling to each other. Each to each beside the music. G, C, D, and flourish of G. The music bows to the rain and the rain does not think –– therefore, disappears.

Variation 9 a 1 Clav.

Canone alla Terza

The Basilisk parades about, giving his evil cluck. After a measure, his dire companion, Asp, follows his dance at the distance of three steps. In the mysterious forest, the bass is free to sniff about, almost invisible, until his presence before the cadence is so reckless that all the forest creatures hide. Small fellow, he can kill with a single glance, front half of chicken, rear of lizard.
Trample underfoot the lion and the dragon, the poet says. Also the Basilisk, bred by a toad, his eye the forest’s single jewel.
And what creature is the bass, lion, or dragon? Perhaps it is the ghostly ferret, Basilisk bane, searching out the burrows of the night. In moonlight, the bed of fallen leaves reveals his savage spinning, always beneath, beneath the trees, beneath the moon, beneath the dark when there is no moon, his bright teeth, arranged in nothingness. The Basilisk cannot escape the cadence, nor asp, nor dragon-lion. But the bass speaks last, wild and final.

Variation 10 a 1 Clav

Fughetta

Johann is telling a story to his children who have gathered around him and are listening in rapt attention (except for little Carl Phillip Emanuel –– there was simply nothing to be done about that child).
“The Fughetta is a small creature only to be found in herds in the meadows beyond the mysterious forest,” Johann begins.
“Does it have horns?” asks little Carl.
“It has one horn at the very tip of its nose,” answers Johann.
“And another, about two measures later?” asks Carl.
“Just so,” says Johann.
“And does it prance about, pooping merrily?” asks Carl.
Now, Wilhelm Friedemann and Gottfried Heinrich begin to titter, and soon, the whole batch of little Bachs are indistinguishable from the two-horned Fughettas as they rear and skip and hoot about the living room. Johann lights his pipe and puffs away, watching his little rascals. He’s got a fugue subject in mind that doesn’t have an interesting interval. Never mind –– a repeated note can be given a mordant or a trill and it will stick out in any meadow.

Variation 11 a 2 Clav.

“12/16” is a way of writing “4/4” in triplets. But it’s not as simple as that. Six notes can be played as two triples or three duplets. Or they can be played with no rhythmic inflection. The easy chairs in the woods are still listening to the little tune in G, but they have begun to fill up with pinecones and salamanders. Here, rest in this one. Brush it out with a stick. Up in the trees, the moon is hatching. There is but one moon, but stars come in threes. Here, the chairs have arms, as do we. And the keys have hands that touch each clavier. The hands of the clock are arms, even the one-armed clock.
Hands, keys, levers, strings. The strings are struck or plucked. Hands have their own levers, a mysterious forest of tendons and muscles, perhaps guided by the moon.
Each night has a moon, save the nights that will not speak.
Go to your room, said the night to its moon. And the sad moon, believing only in ferns and pulleys and sometimes bells, trudges upstairs, leaving behind the season. Master, O Master, O Master, the fire will burn. The banjo will bray. Barbarous, barbarous, barbarous triplets at play. Herr Johann has settled his triad on G.
Carl Philip Emanuel has brought us some salt and pepper. Good lad.

Variation 12

Canone alla Quarta

Four bears in the mysterious forest are dancing after the manner of bears, standing upright in both plain and fancy sight. The first figure of the dance moves on the leftward path, whereas the fourth figure of the dance moves right, matching step for step. The second and third bears become one bear and make up the bass. Of bears, there are many –– the dunce bear with his tiny head; the blind bear who weaves and sings as if a harper; the floating bear who swims in moats and devours chains and nails; the bald bear, slick as a serpent; the midnight bear, of which there are so many, they might be stars.
Song of the bear is like the cat’s tongue, and the bear’s dance is always contrary; if one is loud, the other soft –– if one is wild, the other tame. If one is smoke, another might bring rain.
The most propitious bear is a perch for owls. Owls, then, and bears in the mysterious forest meaning to make meaning. And only the cadence makes an end (in moss and mist, in fog and mystery) the cadence means to end and then, ended, to be dark and silent while every last bear contends to be the last bear.

Variation 13 a 2 Clav.

Sometimes, in the enchanted forest, vines will grow alone, twining about each other. Beneath them, the moonlight has fallen and flamed up. There is a single line, oboe or flute, even violin, rolling out its stanzas over the most careful bass. One bird perched on a bassoon. One fox listening, beginning to imagine a tale.
Now, this really happened, said the fox, and he began to sing his whys. There was, under the growing vines, no stone for him to perch upon. His knees were ragged, his tale full of lies. So many cats lolled on chairs, a single divan. And each time a cat leapt to the window ledge, the fox would why, and the vines would tighten their closed eyes, sticking out their tongues.
Below, in the hole the fox dug, so much sleeping mumbled to itself. This is the story, sleeping dreamed. F sharp to b minor. Not that. E major to a minor. Nor that.
Why, asked the fox. More tightly than the vines pursued their exercise.
All lies, the moon mouthed.
Johann said, Wake me. But the cups had fixed upon a gleam, and somewhere, a boat rocked, still touching the shore.

Variation 14 a 2 Clav.

The thoughts of the mysterious forest are not mysterious. There are the fairy rings draped in toad laundry. There are the thickets, rhododendron and whey. There are the gullies and masked rabbits. The point is to connect the trails and find the stairway to the moon.
You’ll climb a long way holding your kite. The two hands play at the same utterance as if they are linked, but we know the strings wait to be struck, each one knowing naught of the others. One of them leads, and the other follows, but if you choose, you will be wrong.
You are too high on the ladder to the moon. It is not far now. We are close enough to smell it. The moon has been freshly painted. Now, slide down the pole. You may sing if you know the words.

Variation 15 a 1 Clav.

Canone alla Quinta

In the mysterious forest, we see, at first, the spires of the castle and the gaping black behind its windows –– white spires masked by the green trees, once an orchard, perhaps, but now a tangled wood.
In the foreground meadow, find a stag and a leaping trout. Turning toward the cracking of a twig, or perhaps the splashing fish, a rabbit stares. Another bounds toward the wood.
Flowers, yellow and blue, scatter themselves, and two birds on the round top of a tree become its eyes –– the orchard hides as many animals as trees, wolf, bear, dragon. The bass is a wading bird, stepping and half-stepping, measures measuring –– and then comes the darkness out the castle doors –– first from the crypt, then even the spires. A thrush sings from behind a drapery that pretends to be the sky –– we wait to hear it again. It is daytime in the shadows. Look there –– the lost hair ribbon of a child.

Variation 16 a 1 Clav.

Ouverture

Half of our journey completed, we might begin again in the French style. So many dragonflies spin up into the heavens,all searching for Johann’s little piece in G. Away from the wood, their wings dazzle.
Farewell, they cry. And in the key of the sun. Now, they have all departed ,and the clavier stands alone. The silent strings are keen. Herr Bach is having a snack. Cold meat. Warm spirit. What is the wine for a dotted rhythm?
At the cadence, a neat little fugato, so fast as to dazzle the eye (in the corner of which your ear is hiding). As many notes as dragonflies. As many as angels. Listening in the corner. Brave ear –– to have wandered so far away from the enchanted forest. And now, the world is full of bells. We are inside everything, and everything is speaking. All the secrets.

Variation 17 a 2 Clav.

Now, the world is in thirds for the crickets’ short hops and in sixths for the long ones. The mind is all crickets, a bowl of bones. We step lively in the crickets’ stew, pieces of everything up to our knees. This path was tended by goats, this path leads to the world. But the world has put up its walls against us.
Here, step on the steps of thirds. Step, even, on a scale, and over the wall with a small flourish –– now, we’re in the light, and the angels are combing their hair. There is more war to be made when the soldiers are finished with standing. Thumb soldiers with hands of oak leaves. The steady falling of rising thirds. Here, we shall reside though winds rock us, though fate, though acorns, though real things and unreal among the vines and bones conspire to trip.
Say to the stars adieu, to the moon and the fishes about her, bon soir.

Variation 18 a 1 Clav.

Canone alla Sesta

In the mysterious forest, the bass is bounding through his measures. Between him and the moon, clouds sustain themselves at the interval of a sixth. How slowly they pass over the centaur and though he menaces them with his club, they charm him. A tear runs down his cheek.
Some of these dark trees have no leaves, stand startled with their many hands, each with its own arm. Imagine them with guitars. Imagine their voices.
Not here, says one.
Not here, says another. And the bass makes its bounding way among them.
Until together, they sing, Here, here. And the cadence falls upon them like another day.
The centaur hobbles with his club, his stick, searching for the wild woman he lost a thousand years ago. Perhaps the canon carried her away, and in the arms of its voices, she still sings, six steps behind herself. All the stars are falling, reflected in the centaur’s tear.

Variation 19 a 1 Clav.

Say farewell to pygmy kings battling cranes, andante moderato, twigs breaking underfoot. There’s a steady rain, and cranes’ legs depend from cranes. Grackles and crows, all black and violet, bank over the hill. We swim in them, our pygmy kings, our bass, our tenor turning wheels in the air without wings. Evening without wings, the water calms to a fault. But noisy night, spitting out its ghosts, will wander among us. The music must always say what it says, and the music is not in the notes. Say farewell to say farewell. The wine, the bread, the sacrament, the chandelier, the people –– all the people listening to the ouverture. What will come when they wake? The sun is not that far away. So many towers without bells. Comma without clause. Woman without well. Some music swimming to the city. The lights above are light as bells, courses of them. Even the vines.

Variation 20 a 2 Clav.

“Dear Goldberg, play me one of my variations.” Something soft and somewhat lively in character for the insomniac. Mind, they brought Herr Bach a golden goblet filled with a hundred Louis d’ors. Goldberg, pet musician of Count Keyserling, formerly Russian Ambassador in the Court of the Elector of Saxony, played one or a few, like chocolates from a box, this one requiring a pair of keyboards.
“Clavier” from “clavis,” meaning “key.” My variations. The forest is a room and locked, its door, its doors. Walls around its gardens.
My variations, Kaiserling always spoke of them. But here is this one, museum of hummingbirds, fancier than most. Clocks and cuckoos rust under the rain. But one key will not rust –– the key of G. (Bach saw this an ungrateful task because of the inherent sameness of the fundamental harmony.) Yet, he would take no student without imagination. And the closer we listen, the more there is to hear. And the silence after requires another key.

Variation 21

Cannone alla Settima

Cannon at the seventh in g minor. The enchanted forest is a thicket of flats. The dragon can move slowly, if at all. Sometimes, he waits a thousand years to place a foot, a claw. If he did not have those wings, he would be wurm. On his tail’s tip, a head with dependent ears, puppy dog’s. His own ears stand up straight like flames. His brow strong, part lion he. But the tail of the dragon must twist slowly through measures of enchantment, as far from G as A flat. A thing so near is crafty far, and the little dragons step about him like maggots. No shadows do they cast, and their music is as sharp as their father’s teeth. Sometimes, their father is their mother. Do not meet the loathly dragon in the enchanted forest. The moon will spill and lurch. The dragon means to speak. He will say, the end of chaos. If he says the end of chaos, order will begin. He means to say it. But perhaps not soon.

Variation 22 a 1 Clav.

Alla breve

Move among the dead. Move among. Move among the dead. Let us guide the smoke and teach it our ways. Let it learn to wane from the moon. Move among the dead. The forest drapes a hillside, sleeps there, thinks its green thoughts. Its shade shades. Move among the dead. The days fill the forest with hours and one owl. Two full moons slosh and overflow. How silently he flies. Move among the dead. Move among. Move among the dead. The bass is moss. This tongue does not taste. There, beside the moon, this spring, filling with dragonflies. They are listening. High in the trees, the wind has found a perch. It teeters there. The dead parade beneath. They are all one. Only these lines move among the dead.

Variation 23 a 2 Clav.

Certain birds reside in the canopy of the enchanted forest.Their songs echo in the evening and the morning hours when the waters are still. Each bird sends a bell into the green beneath. Like clouds, the green beneath. In the roots of the trees of the angels, hear what angels hear.
Summer is singing. A dragonfly is balancing upon that song. The world rises in courses and falls in courses. One hand knows the next thought –– the other knows the last.
In the canopy of the enchanted forest, days grow and fill. There is enough light to show the ghosts their own shadows. There are enough birds that have risen up over the lost feather and the growing or dying light. Now, they are sleeping, and the songs are the ideas of songs, and the ideas of songs are planted and will grow up tomorrow or in another season or in a thousand years. To make sense of songs is the work of the air. Of the shadows. Of pages and wheels still turning.

Variation 24 a 1 Clav

Canone all’Ottava

On his way home to Lünburg from Hamburg, the young impecunious Bach developed a keen appetite.He heard the noise of a window opening, and saw two herring heads thrown down to a rubbish pile. Herring heads are not to be despised. Johann began to tear them apart, and to his amazement, found a Danish ducat hidden in each head.
In the enchanted forest, schools of herring swim in the green shadows, and the ferns are herring bones. Each herring swims at the octave, and their heads are words and the uncles of words. The word spoken may be ripped apart to lay bare its delicious vowels. Among the bones and consonants and stones, small lizards clamber. And in this piece, flying from heaven’s window, they dart, lizards, herring, ducats in every head.
Who left them there? Looking down, who wonders, parting clouds? Is that young Bach, still busy with his tune in the key of G? No, he is remembering. The taste a true Thuringian remembers, his mouth watering. The tune can rise, and the heads will fall, and Sebastian Bach remembers all.

Variation 25 a 2 Clav.

adagio

Come, slow lisping water, into the shadows. Come, slow snailing grape vine, over the minnows. Where, in all the pages, in all the paths grown over, is the way, the glistening way?
A man sat in a chair. The man in the chair looked into a dark place and found there angels swarming, angels resting on the glass that holds out the night. Then, one angel (or another) flew into the glass that holds out the night, shattering it. Shards and daggers of glass fell dangerously and murdered the Earth (where we were hiding, breathing slowly).
A man rose up, and the chair fell away.
Now, I lay me down to sleep, said the man, and he floated up into the moonlight, out of the enchanted forest, like an ash. And all of the steps were small, making it easy for vines to climb, and the vines whispered one way and then another, and the little tune from long ago twisted and aged and was full of flats and appoggiaturas. And the bass slid down, one eye watching the man in the chair floating away, the other eye watching the night, and the pieces of broken glass, the broken angels.

Variation 26 a 2 Clav.

The eye sees, the mind reads, fingers touch the keys, play upon the keys the same pattern that the mind once found, foraging in the enchanted forest. But the pattern speaks –– not to itself, not to the birds high in the canopy, not to the angels dug deep in the Earth, not to the rules of harmony. Happy the pattern then;the pattern that speaks not. Cicada. Hummingbird. Dragonfly.
A second pattern compresses the first and does speak to itself, and the two annihilate, leaving this buzzing like a broken string: mind.

Variation 27 a 2 Clav.

Cannone alla None

Here in the enchanted forest, on vacation, as it were, we find the Halcyon, a tiny aquatic bird, the size of an ordinary sparrow, its plumage blue and green with a bit of red, its beak small, long, and greenish. See, there are two of them, and at the interval of a ninth, they dart and weave among the leaves and branches.
Curiously, the female lays its eggs upon the surface of the sea, and immediately, the sea becalms itself. Only fourteen days are necessary to incubate and raise its young, and during this time, the elements remain calm –– thus, halcyon days.
Here, there is less need for such a charm –– unless a dragon blunders by –– but dragons are so few, even in the enchanted forest, and they rarely practice their scales. Some say they do not exist, like the bass line for this little piece. But if you want to know for sure, listen to the little tune in G, somewhere south of yesterday.

Variation 28 a 2 Clav.

Beware the trilling monster. Very much a musical clothesline, it floats through the forest, decapitating dragons and bunnies alike. It is invisible save for its careful footprints, eighth notes stepping over the clothesline. The trills cannot be heard until they disappear, and sixteenths scamper, not really going anywhere. A cloud of gnats is the air dreaming. And then, the trills are doubled. Trees lean away from this commotion. Weather hides in the west. The wheel that turns deep in the Earth itself imagines not turning.
Then there is no rain, or perhaps there is a drop of rain, and we realize the trilling is no more –– that winds are stirring in the west. Something like a robin is whittling somewhere. Perhaps it is a scrap of memory. The wheel is resigned to turning. Turning out more silence.

Variation 29 a 1 ovvero 2 Clav.

All the animals gallop on the keys full of the fury of joy and the joy of fury. A man climbs to the chimney of his house, imagining he sees a forest around him. There, he sits and plays the devil’s violin. It is not a lullaby. The fairies are dancing. The Louis d’ors are dancing. Young Bach is dancing, his feet wet from the splashing water. The bass, that hiding fish, slides out from under stones for a few measures, leaps through our arms and hands. The fiddler climbs down from his chimney, still playing. He has become a flock of musicians. Bows beat like wings. Something is gathering. Everything a mountain bears up can begin to fall.

Variation 30 a 1 Clav.

Quolibet

Now, in four voices, all the creatures of the enchanted forest sing. The wood wurms pass through trees and join themselves again. Bonnacon and manticore break wind cheerfully. The centaur peers out the windows of the mysterious castle, pretending to be a swallow. The loathly dragon raises his head and spits out Saint Margaret’s blue robe onto a pile of herring heads. The halcyon hovers above his nest, and the voices mingle in counterpoint and harmony, as if the dragon were drawing in his one great breath –– as if all the blackbirds were not hiding in a snowy place. This last moment turns away and trudges into the shadows. It is time for something to begin.

Aria da capo e fine

ξ

Charles Wyatt is the author of two collections of short fiction), a novella, and two poetry collections He lives in Nashville, TN where he was principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony for 25 years.

Source: Urtext Verlag edition of Goldberg-Variations BWV 988. Quote: "a copy of the original edition of the Goldberg Variations discovered in Strassbourg in 1975, containing corrections and additions in Bach's own hand."

READ PREVIOUS

home