Rescued by the Goldberg Variations

Were this a less good book than it is, it would be called How Bach Can Help You Grieve. As it is, Counterpoint serves very well, describing the American art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott’s intertwined themes: his reaction to the death of his mother, with whom he had a fractious and traumatic relationship, and his attempt to learn Bach’s Goldberg Variations, through which he considers the ability of the greatest music to ease us out of a senseless pit of grief.

This is a deeply serious and often affecting book, combining the ‘grief memoir’ with the genre created by Alan Rusbridger in Play It Again, an account of an amateur pianist learning Chopin’s Ballade No. 1. Kennicott’s two strands, of memory and music, become the first and second subjects of a book in sonata form, developed and recapitulated into a satisfying whole. He has written a voyage around his wounded and wounding mother, by way of an aria and 30 variations.

Kennicott’s mother, he concedes, was never an alcoholic, never uncontrollably violent, never mentally unstable. His topic is the slow drip of volatility and spite and prejudice that eroded his childhood. He narrates, coolly and painfully, the ways in which she inflicted her own fears and failures on her precocious and talented son, pushing soap into his mouth after he swears, pulling him off the piano stool by his hair, or hitting the back of his neck so hard, after some mild misdemeanour, that he topples over, in shock and in tears.

The paragraphs are carefully shorn of recrimination, and his calm, polished sentences unspool with a level-headed honesty and self-scrutiny. This book is a retreat from the world in which his body exists into the world in which his mind might live, carving out meaning and sense from a set of variations that has order and beauty, far away from the mundanities of grief, and the bureaucracy of death, and the tight grip of the fears and insecurities that were his maternal inheritance.

The Goldberg Variations are an iconic wonder of Western music, and were composed, so legend has it, for the pianist Johann Goldberg to perform to an insomniac count, ‘that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights’.