The Pianist Vikingur Olafsson on ‘History’s Greatest Keyboard Work’

Vikingur Olafsson calls it “a workaholic’s sabbatical”: The Icelandic pianist, 39, is dedicating almost all his performances this season to Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.

“It’s an experiment,” Olafsson said in an interview. “How much can I extract myself, from the interpreter’s perspective? How much variety will I be able to discover throughout this year?”

Quite a lot, one imagines. Along with the tour comes a recording of the “Goldbergs,” released on Deutsche Grammophon this month. Flush with the joy of interpretation, it is a remarkable recording even for an artist who already has a number of remarkable recordings to his name. Listen to it, and you will find ample evidence that Olafsson is a pianist who wants to think about music, not just play it.

“I think we’re in a golden age of pianists,” said Clive Gillinson, the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, where Olafsson will appear in February. “I mean, there are so many really extraordinary artists and players at the moment. So the fact that he is truly special within that context, I think is a very big statement. And he is. Very special.”

In the interview, Olafsson discussed his experience with “Goldbergs” and how he thinks about what he calls “history’s greatest keyboard work.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

<b>Q: </b><strong>You have been playing the “Goldbergs” for 25 years. What were your first experiences with them?</strong>

A: It actually goes back to that famous recording from 1955. When I heard Glenn Gould, I realized that Bach is not one thing; he’s everything at the same time. The way Gould plays them, it turns this music from something that was seen as predominantly academic into something that was performance material — the sheer visceral side of the “Goldberg” Variations, the physicality of Bach, the physicality of the writing.

So I think when I was 14, I was just captivated that the piano can sound like this, that someone can actually play this three- or four- or five-part counterpoint and somehow be able to keep four or five different voices absolutely individual in their head. That’s something that took me so many years to try to capture myself.

One thing that I’ve come to do is to emphasize and enjoy and allow the variety and individual stamp of each variation to speak for itself, and not try to do what Gould tried to do in the later recording, which is to try to impose a sort of cohesiveness to the whole construction. I think that’s closer to Bach’s message, the earlier Gould, where he allowed them to be so incredibly different.

<strong><b>Q: </b>If you’re focusing on the character of each variation, how do you keep the individual and the totality working together?</strong>

A: It’s a very good question, and it’s a different answer for every performance, of course. The space between the notes, between the movements, between the repeats, is something that I’m more and more interested in. I do all the repeats, because I think there are so many opportunities for invention in the repeats with this material. But how do you start a repeat? Is it possible within that framework to still surprise people? To be surprised by the expected? I think so.

Now I have this slightly naive thought, seeing this piece like a life cycle. You have the Aria, which is the ode to life, the ode to the birth of something, and then you have these 14 variations. If you’re lucky you have a privileged childhood, you go through it like my boys, 2 and 4. They don’t know the meaning of tragedy; for them tragedy is not to get spaghetti for dinner when we are serving fish, or something. They have no idea. You have those 14 variations, and it’s just like seeing the world, and seeing what it can be, all coming from the same cell.

Then Variation 15 — nothing prepares you for it. It’s a little bit like the first time we lose someone close to us, whether it’s a grandparent or whoever it may be, the first time you experience tragedy. It’s so surprising; nothing tells us there’s going to be a minor episode in this incredibly joyous work. And then you bounce back, like you have to bounce back in life. You have the French overture, which is as symbolic of a restart as you can have. Then Variation 21, it hits you again, with a chromatic lament in the bass, and you go through something like this again. But you bounce back, and then in 25, it comes, and it comes in a different way. It’s when you go through something that all of us go through at some point, if we keep on living. We go through a great tragedy.

You come back, and you finish the piece in triumphant glory, with all these super virtuosic variations. You have the Aria again, but it really feels like you’re looking back at your life. You listen to this aria, and you know the end is coming, you know the last G major chord is coming, you don’t want that chord to come, you don’t want to hear the silence that follows the “Goldberg” Variations. It frightens me, that silence.

When the aria finishes, we feel like it continues, but we don’t continue. That’s how I feel about this piece now.

<strong><b>Q: </b>In your liner notes you compare the Quodlibet, the last variation, which layers folk songs on top of each other, to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” How does that fit in?</strong>

A: If you had written this aria and these 29 variations, and you had just gone out of control with it, what can you write? How do you return home? And I think that is the message, to return home is to go to your roots. For Bach, here, it’s folk music. It’s so surprising to have [singing] “Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben,” which is one of the most famous folk songs of Europe, of any age. Do you know the text in German?

<strong><b>Q: </b>It’s something about cabbages, right?</strong>

A: “Parsnips and cabbages have betrayed me.” It’s anti-veganism, so it’s super unwoke today. Basically he wants meat; he is sick and tired of all those potatoes, or whatever they’re serving him. In Iceland, my sons, they sing this in kindergarten still in the year 2023, and the text is about robbers and how we have to protect ourselves against the evil Vikings, or whatever it is. So it still lives, this song.

To bring this song, and another one, into this idea of a quodlibet, which is tied to the tradition of the Bach family together, improvising spontaneous counterpoint, as you do in family gatherings — it seems to me to signal that the hero is finally there, in the company of people from his background, from his roots. The hero returns home. To me, that feeling of “Alle Menschen werden Brüder,” it has that camaraderie and this kind of collective experience of belonging to a bigger entity than the individual. It’s certainly an individual who travels through those 29 variations, and all of a sudden we encounter our family and friends.

<strong><b>Q: </b>I suppose nobody wants to be alone at the end, do they?</strong>

A: It’s very true. It’s also when you almost remember your audience, that you are not alone in the hall as a pianist. You’re just really there with Bach, and with the universe. But then when the Quodlibet starts, all of a sudden you feel a kind of party, you feel the celebration of it.

<strong><b>Q: </b>So it has more of an inner meaning than, say, the fugue near the end of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations?</strong>

A: Exactly. I see it as a very conceptual gesture. People can of course always choose to see everything by Bach just as purely abstract expression. Stravinsky would probably tell me off for saying what I’ve just said. But Stravinsky isn’t here, and I’m still saying it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/arts/music/vikingur-olafsson-goldberg-variations.html">The New York Times</a>.