One cannot but smile; the mere thought of thirty variations is soporific. Yet an examination of them will convince one that Kaiserling must have rewarded Bach for sheer delight in the music, not for the blessed forgetfulness in sleep to which it may have been expected to seduce him. The quality of these variations is inexpressibly vivacious and charming. Bach shows himself, it is true, always the master of sounds and the science of music; but this may be taken as the secure foundation on which he allows himself for once to be the brilliant and even dazzling virtuoso. With the object in view of enchanting an amateur who must have been, _ex officio_, very much a man of the world at large, Bach composed objectively. That is to say he wrote not so much to express himself as to please another. The same might be said of two other of the latest harpsichord works, the _Musikalisches Opfer_ and the _Kunst der Fuge_; except that in both of these masterpieces his aim was more technical. In the Goldberg Variations he is, so to speak, off duty. Consequently, there is in them little trace of the stern, albeit tender idealist, or of the teacher, or of the man sunk in the mystery of religious devotion. There are nine canons, at every interval from the unison to the ninth, some in contrary motion. But even in these learned processes there is a social suavity and charm. Witness especially the canon at the third (the ninth variation), and that at the sixth (the eighteenth variation). Only the twenty-fifth variation seems to show Bach entirely submerged within himself. Elsewhere he is for the most part primarily a virtuoso. In the matter of wide skips, of crossing the hands, and of sparkling velocity, he outruns Scarlatti. In fact the virtuosity of the variations as a whole is far beyond Scarlatti. To begin with, he wrote for a harpsichord with two manuals; and in many of the variations, conspicuously in the eighth, the eleventh, the twentieth, and the twenty-third, he availed himself to the uttermost of the advantages of such an instrument. The hands constantly pass by each other on their way from one extremity of the keyboard to the other, or cross and recross. The parts which they play are interwoven in complications which, unhappily, must forever be the despair of the pianist. In such cases, of course, he may not justly be compared with Scarlatti, who wrote always for one manual.