[Im Hoon-gu's Philmusic] Goldberg Variations

Bach's Goldberg Variations in The Silence of the Lambs

[Asia Economy Reporter Im Hoon-gu]

What connects these completely different films: Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Like Father, Like Son, and Mamoru Hosoda’s animated film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time?

If you have seen some of these or at least know their titles, here is one more hint. The background music (BGM) during the unforgettable scene of the brutal police murder by the character Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, who passed away several years ago.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685?1750)’s Goldberg Variations has a very intricate structure. In The Silence of the Lambs, as the eerie and terrifying yet captivating character Dr. Lecter escapes from prison and kills a police officer with a baton, this piano piece by Bach plays in the background.

Audiences listening to the Goldberg Variations, specifically the aria, during this gruesome scene experience a peculiar emotional chemical reaction. (This is similar to the feeling evoked by Vivaldi’s Winter from The Four Seasons playing during the scene in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy where a tooth is pulled out.)

When you insert the album into a CD player, the digital number 32 appears. Bach’s work starts with the aria, followed by 30 variations, and ends again with the aria. This piece is the longest among compositions written solely for keyboard instruments, yet it has a very meticulous structure. The 30 variations, excluding the aria, are not a simple sequence but are intricately related. Centered around variation 16, the entire composition is divided into the first and second halves. The 30 variations appear in groups of three, repeated 10 times. Through the canon form, variations that are multiples of three induce changes in the overall flow, creating a sophisticated structure like assembling a puzzle. Although it may seem like a complex maze at first glance, the entrance and exit are aligned on the same plane, reminiscent of Buddhist concepts of reincarnation.

There is an anecdote that this piece was composed to treat the insomnia of Count Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk, the Russian ambassador stationed in Dresden, Germany, but considering the vast and intricate musical structure, this story lacks credibility.