Jean Rondeau Presented by Liszt Academy

Forkel, the first important biographer of Bach, relates a tale in which the great Johann Sebastian composed the so-called Goldberg Variations on the commission of a certain Count Keyserlinck. The nobleman suffered from insomnia so he asked the composer to write a piece of music that his own harpsichordist, Johann Teophil Goldberg, could play in the long sleepless nights. The count finally paid a handsome sum: one hundred double Louis d’or on a gold platter. It’s a nice story but certainly not true in this form. The fact is that the work appeared in print during Bach’s lifetime, in 1742, as the concluding part of the Clavier-Übung series, but there is no mention of the dedicatee on the front cover of the score, nor is there any mention of Goldberg. Despite this, it is no exaggeration to state that the work is the king of variation series ever written, or ever to be written.