Goldberg Variations:
Ternary Patterns for Insomnia,
choreographed by Örjan Andersson,
music performed by Scottish Ensemble.
Folkoperan, Stockholm,
Spring 2022.
There’s a story about the origins of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that suggests it was written to help an aristocratic patron fall asleep on insomniac nights. Throughout all my years of listening to this piece of music in America—at home and in concert halls, alone and with others—I never once heard or read a reference to this apocryphal tale. Yet I’ve already encountered it on two separate occasions during recent visits to Stockholm.
The first was in June of 2018, when I attended a late-night performance of the Goldbergs during Stockholm’s annual Early Music Festival. There were two unusual things about the concert, which took place in the upstairs parish hall of a church in the Old Town. One was that the music was performed on a compact harpsichord rather than the usual concert grand piano. The other was that the audience members were invited—nay, strongly urged—to lie down on yoga mats for the duration of the performance so that they could fall asleep to the music if they wished. Both these diversions-from-the-normal were made possible because the parish hall was empty enough to accommodate the supine customers and small enough to make a harpsichord audible. And both were intended, according to the program notes, to refer back to the original circumstances of composition.
Four years later, at the Stockholm Folkoperan, I came across the same allusion in Örjan Andersson’s Goldberg Variations: Ternary Patterns for Insomnia. The “ternary” of the title, which refers to the number three, was not particularly evident in the dance (solos and duets were, if anything, more common than trios), but perhaps it was meant to invoke Bach’s use of a canon on every third variation. As for insomnia—well, let me just say I think it’s strange that the Swedes, the people who gave us ABBA, think that Bach’s repetitiveness needs any kind of justification… But never mind. I don’t want to waste time quibbling about the title when it’s the dance itself that matters.
Andersson is far from the first choreographer to base a work on the Goldbergs. Recently Pam Tanowitz did a version that I sorely regret not having seen (its YouTube incarnation looks fascinating). What I have seen, three times, is Jerome Robbins’s eighty-minute piece for the New York City Ballet. My first two sightings took place a week apart in 2015—overwhelmed by its beauty, I felt impelled to return immediately—and my third was just last spring, in a satisfying revisit. Both the Robbins and the Tanowitz treat the music with infinite respect; they include a live, prominently featured pianist, either actually onstage or spotlit off to the side, who plays the traditional arrangement with concert-level finesse.
“Respect” is not the first word that comes to mind in the case of the Andersson version, though that may account for some of the joy in the performance. For this choreographer and his collaborators, Bach is not some delicate piece of porcelain to be handled with kid gloves. He is instead a living force, strong enough to be pushed and pulled around while still remaining himself. (Think Shakespeare, as rendered in some of the more clever and successful updates, which assume that genius will out even in modern dress.)
This casualness, if you will, starts with the choice of the musical arrangement: Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s 1992 orchestration for a string chamber group. Rather than a single pianist planted firmly in one spot, we get the eleven members of the Scottish Ensemble, led by the intrepid violinist Jonathan Morton. When added to the five dancers in the Andersson Dance group, they give the choreographer sixteen figures to play with in his seventy-minute piece. And play he does, starting as early as the opening variation, where all the dancers and musicians end up prancing and swirling about the stage, even as the music continues unabated.
Andersson’s own dancers (Jozsef Forro, Paul Pui Wo Lee, Javier Perez, Danielle de Vries, and Johanna Wernmo) are pretty terrific: beautifully trained yet relaxed, capable of lively humor as well as deep emotion. For most of the dance they take center-stage, and we are happy enough to watch them. At one point, though, the five of them simply sit down with their backs to us, appreciatively watching the eleven musicians play through the sixth variation. At another point—this one between variations—all sixteen dancers and musicians engage in what one of them describes as “ordinary walking,” although it turns out to be far from ordinary. As the choreographed figures separate and regroup, forming phalanxes of four and three and two and eight, we can sense a surprising affinity between the melding of these silent walkers and the patterns of Bach’s music. Here as elsewhere, the performance benefits enormously from the tangible feeling of accord that prevails both among and between the musicians and the dancers—which may be explained, in part, by the fact that these sixteen people, give or take a few replacements, have been performing this piece together since 2015.
Some of Andersson’s choreographic experiments are less successful than others. When a single violinist put down her instrument and executed a few gestures and poses drawn from the street-dancing tradition, I was charmed; when the bulk of the musicians “danced” with similar ground-slapping, body-slapping motions, while the dancers disappeared completely and only one or two string-players carried on the tune, I was less so. But at no point in the hour-plus piece did I ever feel bored or annoyed, as I often am at the shenanigans of self-conscious “rebellious” choreographers. I could always see the point of what Andersson was doing, and I could always connect it with Bach.
For me, the most thrilling aspect of the work was the way it managed to vary its pace and sensibility, despite the evident continuity provided by the music—and in this, too, it was remarkable true to Bach. The first three variations, for instance, featured individual dancers moving every which way on their own; no one was doing the same steps or gestures as anyone else, except in brief moments of echoing or “challenging” between pairs. Then, just as we began to hunger for a bit of synchronized movement, we got Variation Four, with a whole row of dancers, male and female, performing exactly the same gestures precisely to the music. Elsewhere in the piece, slow and intricate solos alternated with rapid, near-maniacal scenes in which dancers manhandled props, removed clothing, or otherwise produced Ionesco-like chaos.
Perhaps my favorite moment in the whole dance came at the halfway point, when the five dancers, who had barely touched each other before, began the fifteenth variation tightly clustered in a human bundle. They then proceeded to lift one member of the group and then another over their heads or around behind their backs, forming and reforming the connected shapes in a way that was somehow tremendously moving. It was in this variation, too, that I could most clearly see the gestural pattern from the beginning repeating itself at the end, just as Bach’s piece does in its traditional arrangement.
In that piano version—for instance, as played by Glenn Gould in both of his wonderful recordings, or by each of the skilled pianists who accompanied the Robbins and Tanowitz performances—the Goldberg Variations has thirty-two segments, opening with an aria that repeats itself at the end, after the thirty variations have been played. Robbins used this structure to great effect, moving back and forth from the eighteenth century to the modern period in both dance style and costuming until his final “modern” couple recapitulated exactly the steps performed by the original Baroque pair. The circle, he seemed to be saying, had now come to its full close, with past and present joining together to create a single, immensely satisfying whole.
Andersson’s intentions here are far different. He has no desire to close the circle—on the contrary, he wants it to remain open, leaving us with a bit of uncertainty and even a shade of melancholy. So he cuts the two arias and gives us only the variations. And in the final variation he does something even more radical. In place of the cheerful invocation of German folksong that normally makes up the quodlibet (the variation that allowed Robbins to stage a thrilling, all-cast, penultimate-movement finale), Andersson presents us with just the bass player alone onstage, slowly plucking her instrument so as to produce a few deep notes. Then the stage goes dark, and there is only silence.
Wendy Lesser is the founding and current editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest book is Scandinavian Noir, out in paperback from Picador.
