Chaconne from Partita No.2 in D minor for solo violin (1720) (arr. Busoni)

arranged for piano by Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1925)

Even some of the greatest of 19th-century Bach admirers - Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Busoni - felt that the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin were, in one way or another, incomplete and in need of their attention. Mendelssohn published a violin-and-piano version of the Chaconne from Partita No.2 in D minor and Schumann supplied piano accompaniments for all six violin sonatas and partitas and for the six the cello suites as well. Brahms’s creative reaction to the Chacone was to make an arrangement for left hand only, limiting the resources of the piano so that he would “feel like a violinist” when he played it. Busoni, on the other hand, was not in the least interested in imposing limitations on his Bach interpretations. His monumental arrangement of the Chaconne in D minor, which was written in Boston in 1892 and published in the third volume of the Complete Bach-Busoni Edition in 1920, is not only a masterpiece of transcription but also an unashamedly extravagant display of piano technique.

Although Busoni’s version of the Chaconne is less than completely faithful to Bach’s score - among other alien features it includes four bars Bach never thought of – it is remarkably successful in realizing the extent of that “world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings” Brahms identified in the work. It supplies textures and harmonies Bach could only hint at in scoring for solo violin while clarifying both the detail of the structure, its 64 four-bar variations on a four-chord harmonic progression, and its overall symmetry. The half-way point, where Bach re-introduces the opening bars in their original harmonies, is marked by an impressive passage of chordal scoring, which is immediately offset by the more conciliatory keyboard colouring applied to the following episode in D major. Beginning quietly, the closing D minor section ends with a restatement of the opening bars in sonorities as massive as Busoni could contrive.