From The Inbox

Oh dear. It seems not even the holiday weekend could save me from the beginning of what will surely be a mini-deluge of pianist-authored hate mail in response to my comments on Bach played on the piano, and on Sergey Schepkin's reading of Bach's Goldberg Variations. I won't go over all my correspondent's tedious and predictable rejoinders to those comments, but one unpredictable rejoinder vis-à-vis Schepkin's reading struck me as particularly clueless:

[A]nd you took no notice of something very special done by Schepkin. When he does the D.C. [i.e., da Capo] Aria he gives a finality to the set of variations by playing it slower than the Aria is taken in the beginning, and sets it off as special as a closing by playing the repeats an octave higher.

Yes ... well ... um ... how to answer this, er, criticism? I think I'll simply remind my correspondent that, as he correctly noted, the closing Aria is da Capo, the score at that point merely marked, "Aria da Capo e Fine", which, as my pianist correspondent ought to know, is an instruction to go back to the "head" (i.e., the beginning), and play the Aria over again as an end to the set.

Bach meant what he wrote. His instruction to the keyboardist says simply, "Play it again, Sam." It says nothing about playing it again, but differently this time. In fact, by playing it differently, the keyboardist defeats utterly the brilliant stroke accomplished by that more than merely formal da Capo Aria. If played as Bach intended it to be played — which is to say, precisely as it was played at the opening — the da Capo Aria not only formally closes the set of variations, but says quite affectingly: "Hi there. It's just little old simple but lovely me again. Some offspring I produced between our first meeting and this one, wouldn't you say? Didn't think I had it in me, did you. That'll teach you not to judge such as I by her simple but lovely face alone."

Though no Bach scholar, Mia Farrow would understand this perfectly.