Chapter Seven
On Editing Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
For Arthur Mendel (March 31, 1973)
In the spring of 1934, after I had fi rst played the Goldberg Variations in New
York, Arthur Mendel suggested editing them and brought me together with
Carl Engel, editor for the publishing house of G. Schirmer in New York.^1
During a subsequent transatlantic voyage I began preparing the text, and that
summer in Salzburg wrote most of the preface. I was then twenty-three years
old, and full of zeal for purity of texts that had little precedent in the so-called
practical editions hitherto published in America, with the notable exception
of Schirmer’s own Widor-Schweitzer edition of Bach’s organ works. My views
were not always those held by Mr. Engel, or by Harold Bauer, the eminent pia-
nist who often served as consultant to Schirmer’s. But by agreeing to relatively
harmless interventions that today would probably not be considered neces-
sary, such as indicating the execution of ornaments and writing out crossing
voices on extra staves, I managed to leave the text free of any such accretions
as fi ngerings, phrasings, dynamics, or tempo markings. The volume was fi nally
published in May 1938 with a handsome cover that reproduced the engraved
border from the title page of Bach’s original edition.
In 1956, I was asked whether I wished to make any alterations in my preface
for the printing of an English edition, and I replied that it might be best not to
intervene. I already regarded this preface as a document of my extreme youth
that might be hard to match with the ideas and style of later years, but I did
- There is nothing in the manuscript to provide background for this essay. I
assume it was presented at an occasion in honor of Arthur Mendel.
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