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Fernando Valenti and the “Goldberg Variations”
MARCH 1986
Some years ago, as the word was getting around that he would soon die from leukemia, Dinu Lipatti played a concert in France that was rumored would be his last, as indeed it proved to be. It was recorded, and it is not merely the act of a morbid imagination that causes one, listening to the Bach and the Chopin, to detect in it a strain of poignant yet somehow exultant fatalism.
When, in the fall of 1980, the harpsichordist Fernando Valenti surmised from what his doctors said that he would not survive the cancer detected in his throat, he was practicing to record Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” He had played them before, as a very young man: then he buried them, devoting the thirty-five years after his graduation from college to giving recitals and making recordings (over eighty records)—of Bach, to be sure, but his specialty has always been Scarlatti (in rendering Scarlatti he has no peer). But the itch to do the “Goldberg” came, and would not go. And now it appeared that if he made the recording, it would be his valedictory.
It happened that the season was full of “Goldbergs.” A generation ago if one wanted to hear the “Goldberg Variations,” one needed to buy the recording of Wanda Landowska, and then, a little later, Rosalyn Tureck’s on the piano, and Ralph Kirkpatrick’s on the harpsichord. Then, of course, Glenn Gould came along, and his convulsive rendition swept the attention of the musical world. The critics were carried away by the sheer effrontery of his conception, so that whether one thought it a musical epiphany or sheer travesty, his interpretation was for twenty years the center of attention of what is arguably the supreme achievement of the baroque keyboard. In 1982 two events coincided ironically: Glenn Gould, age fifty, died, and Fernando Valenti, age fifty-four, did not die. And, at about the same time, they had recorded the “Goldberg,” Gould again to an uproarious reception.
A casualty was Fernando Valenti’s “Goldberg Variations” (sine qua non), scarcely noticed when it was first released. He had repaired to a studio in New Jersey, and there, in three days, he did the “Aria and Thirty Variations,” written in 1742 at the behest of Count Kayserling for his friend Goldberg.
Although Bach stipulated that all the variations should be repeated, Valenti repeats none of them, and inevitably—for those who knew he was uncertain whether he would survive the season —there is something of the sense of his rushing forward to arrive at the final Variation before the grim reaper cut him off. But that said, one finds in the performance an absolutely secure sense of tempo. One very quickly discerns, on hearing Valenti, that he is technically capable of taking any of the movements at the speed of Glenn Gould or Andras Schiff but generally elects not to, and the result is that sense of ultimate composure that perfect music, perfectly executed, brings. After Variation 30, before the last reiteration of the Aria, there is a pause of (by Valenti’s standards) melodramatic length: it lasts perhaps five, six seconds. And then the Aria proceeds, stately as a winged chariot, until, six bars before the end, there is, in the slight rubato, just a hint of that reluctance to conclude anything so nearly divine: the artist expressing his reluctance to conclude life itself, and in so doing, giving life so noble a sound.