According to the account of Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach composed the variations for the Russian envoy Hermann Carl von Keyserlinck in Dresden, whose harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg was to relieve the ailing count’s sleepless nights with them. Gerd Zacher, whose introduction of 1995 is printed in the booklet, points out that recent research dates the print to around 1741, that a formal dedication is missing and that Goldberg would then have been only 14 years old; Bach probably dedicated a copy to the count on a visit to Dresden. The theme, a sarabande, comes from the “Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach”.
The 30 variations between the Aria and its return form two halves of 15 each, the second opened by an Ouverture. Each half consists of five groups of three: a virtuoso duo, a canon between two upper voices over an accompanying bass, and a character piece. The canons grow from the unison to the ninth, the number of the variation divided by three giving the interval; at the end stands the four-part Quodlibet on three lines of folk songs. Zacher sees the overall form as a kind of giant passacaglia and hears Variation 1 as a polonaise paying homage to the Russian envoy.
Martin Schmeding regards his organ version as a logical extension of the harpsichord version: the wealth of stop combinations is meant to bring out the affects and the often abrupt contrasts of the sequence of variations. He intensifies the duos from one to the next, from the 8-foot and 4-foot flutes in Variation 5 to two contrasted mixture plena in Variation 29. Variation 3 is heard as a French trio with jeu de tierce and basse de voix humaine, Variation 16 as a French overture on the grands jeux, Variation 21 with both tremulants at once, the Quodlibet on the full plenum with 32-foot pedal; the returning Aria sings on the Unda maris. He plays repeats either in both halves of a variation or in neither, so as to preserve the proportions.
Gottfried Silbermann died in 1753 while building the Court Church organ; his pupils Zacharias Hildebrandt and Johann Oehme and his nephew Johann Daniel Silbermann completed the instrument, which was consecrated on 2 February 1755. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart praised it in a letter to his wife in 1789. In 1944 the pipework was moved to the Marienstern convent shortly before the bombing of Dresden, while the case and bellows were destroyed by fire. After the reconstruction by Jehmlich (1964–1971), Wegscheider and Jehmlich restored the historic bellows and the original pitch of 415 Hz in 2001/2002.
Martin Schmeding, born in Minden in 1975, was organist of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden from 2002 to 2004 and became professor of organ at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg in 2004. He recorded the variations in the cathedral from 31 March to 3 April 2009. Besides the ECHO Klassik, the recording received “5 Diapason” from the magazine Diapason and “La Clef” from ResMusica; Organ – Journal für die Orgel named it a reference recording.