Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations Reimagined [Hardcover]

This book offers the first detailed reception history of adaptations of Johann Sebastian Bach'sGoldberg Variationsfrom 1800-2020. By focusing on ways the piece has been arranged, transcribed, and reworked, or quoted in in film, dance, literature, visual art, and digital media, it reveals changing views about the role of the composer and score that have impacted recent performance practices and notions of the work concept. Beyond this, it features the work of composers, many from underrepresented backgrounds, who have recently deconstructed Bach by reimagining the subjects, compositional procedures, and forms, using contemporary compositional approaches.This book provides the first detailed reception history of adaptations of Johann Sebastian Bach'sAria mit 30 Ver?nderungen(Goldberg Variations, BWV 988). It documents multiple ways Bach's work has appeared in arrangements, transcriptions, and re-compositions from 1800 to 2020. It examines adaptations for the traditional concert hall as well as for dance, theater, cinema, literature, digital media, and visual art. Overall, the book reveals a dramatic increase in adaptations of the piece in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.In addition, it brings the reception history of Bach'sGoldberg Variationsinto dialogue with broader scholarly discourse about performance practice issues. The piece was often performed in transcribed or arranged versions in the nineteenth century and then again in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Yet if nineteenth-century adaptations of this piece were usually created out of necessity, as a means of performing a lengthy piece without access to the original instrument, many twenty-first century adaptations, which have developed alongside historically informed performances, were motivated by deconstructionist ideologies. This contrasts with the middle part of the twentieth century, when there was a prevalence of historically infolÃ4