Goldberg Moves

In the organizer's words:

Goldberg Moves - Show: Bach goes breakdance

A multimedia show by ECHO prize-winner Christoph Hagel and the DDC Entertainment Company, which has already caused an international sensation with "Breakin' Mozart".

About the show:

With "Goldberg Moves" , Christoph Hagel and the DDC have taken on one of the most important piano works in the world: Johann Sebastian Bach's (1685-1750) famous "Goldberg Variations".

Compared to his contemporaries, Bach wrote relatively few compositions in variation form. The 30 "different variations" on a bass model took their name from an anecdotal report in Johann Nikolaus Forkel's biography "Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke": Reichsgraf Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk (1696-1764), a Russian envoy at the Dresden court who suffered from insomnia, is said to have asked Bach for piano pieces to be played to him at night by his protégé, the highly talented harpsichord student Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756), and which "would be so gentle and somewhat lively in character that he might be cheered up a little by them on his sleepless nights. Bach believed that he could best fulfill this wish with variations, which he had previously considered a thankless task because of the constant basic harmony. The Count subsequently called them his variations. He couldn't get enough of them, and for a long time, when sleepless nights came, he would say: Dear Goldberg, please play me one of my variations. The count presented him [J. S. Bach] with a golden cup filled with 100 louisd'or."

Even if the anecdote has a kernel of truth, its veracity is doubtful. For example, the first edition published in 1741 lacks a formal dedication to Count von Keyserlingk. Furthermore, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg was only thirteen years old when the work was written. Even with his extraordinary talent, the immense technical and interpretative demands of the work must have presented him with enormous challenges.

The exact date of composition of the ingenious "Clavier-Übungen IV", as it was originally titled, is unclear; there is no autograph of Bach. However, it is assumed that they were composed not too long before they were printed, i.e. around 1739-1740. The name "Goldberg Variations" (or "Goldberg'sche Variationen") only became established in the course of the 19th century.

Together with the dancers and artists, Hagel and the DDC explode the dignified world of serious music: with piano, electronically alienated beats, headspins, power moves, freezes and unique visualizations, they once again show how powerful, seemingly effortless and absolutely contemporary the adaptation of the musical heavyweight Johann Sebastian Bach works for the furious dance forms of contemporary young culture.

This content has been machine translated.

Price information:

Advance booking prices from € 20.50 to € 31.50 B.O. prices from € 22.50 to € 33.50