Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations Reimagined

Abstract This book provides the first detailed reception history of adaptations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Aria mit 30 Veränderungen (Goldberg Variations, BWV 988). It documents multiple ways the work has appeared in arrangements, transcriptions, and re-compositions from 1800 to 2020. It examines adaptations for the traditional concert hall, theater, cinema, digital media, literature, visual art, and dance. In the process, the book reveals a dramatic increase in adaptations of the piece in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The reception history documented in the book also considers performance practice issues and the musical work concept. It shows that, particularly since the late 1980s, there has been a loosening of the regulative hold of the modernist work concept associated with single authorship, structural unity, and an autonomous score. The book thus contributes to recent studies about adaptations, the role of musical authorship, and changing notions of Bach and the work concept.