If there is one thing music lovers “know” about the Goldberg Variations, it is the continually trotted-out fun fact that in the final variation, titled “Quodlibet,” Bach superimposed the melodies of two merry old German folk songs. Scholars and enthusiasts have long found this knowledge attractive, for various reasons. Nationalists fixed on the “old German” element. Communists embraced the “folk” element. Most others focused simply on the “merry.”(…)
While there is plenty of humorous material to seek in Bach, it seems the Goldbergs Quodlibet is not a good place to find it. Some performers and listeners, and even
excerpt from “Bach against Modernity” by Michael Marissen
Herr Bach himself, may well have smiled with pleasure at its extremely clever and witty combination of hymn and folk song, but in light of new evidence, the now traditional notion that the Goldbergs Quodlibet would have been received as simply jocular does look rather unlikely. What is so remarkable and marvelous about the concordant motley “space” of Bach’s joyous Quodlibet is that the whole is a lot more than the sum of its parts. In many segments of the real world of eighteenth-century Europe, the authoritative voices of Enlightenment reason, individual experience, and art-as-entertainment were getting louder and louder. But throughout the world of Bach’s music, most palpably and impressively in the Quodlibet from his Goldberg Variations, the suprapersonal spheres of the “secular” and the “sacred” were put forward together in an all-embracing harmony. Bach would have written the Goldberg Variations not as jokesome entertainment or as self-expression but as an act of premodern Lutheran tribute to the heavenly and earthly realms of God.
What does a “Quodlibet” sound like with tunes we all know?
Hear below the arrangement of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen à la Eleanor Rigby, composed in 2008 by Long Beach-based composer Tony Tripp:
UP CLOSE AND CLASSICAL 
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