Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations Reimagined

This book provides the first detailed reception history of adaptations of Johann Sebastian Bach's Aria mit 30 Ver¿erungen (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's Goldberg Variations into 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 w