Chaconne in D minor for solo violin

(from Partita No.2 in D minor, BWV 1004)

No one understood Bach’s Chaconne in D minor better than Brahms. Although he described it to Clara Schumann as “incomprehensible” as well as “wonderful,” he was aware that its greatness derives essentially from its limitations: “Using the technique adapted to a small instrument the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings.” That is why when he transcribed it for piano in 1877 rather than lavish the whole range of keyboard resources on it, as Busoni was to do twenty years later, he scored it for left hand only. Playing it that way, he said, made him “feel like a violinist!”

Exactly how a real violinist feels when faced by much the longest and most challenging of all Bach’s pieces for a solo string instrument – even if, as in this case, it is separated from the four preceding movements in the Partita – only he or she could say. For the listener, however, it is an inexhaustible source of fascination, not least because there are so many different ways of listening to it on so many different levels. Few will hear it, in detail, for what it fundamentally is: a series of 64 four-bar variations on a four-chord harmonic progression. The composer probably did not intend that it should be heard that way, since he never presents the progression in its basic form. Although its is expressed in an elaborated melodic form as the bass line of the sarabande theme introduced in the first four bars and more or less clearly repeated in that form in the first eight variations, from that point onwards the bass line is more often disguised than immediately recognisable.

What Bach surely did intend, however, is that the ear should perceive at least the overall symmetry of the piece, which is divided into two equal halves with the opening four-bar sarabande theme recalled in its original form after the first thirty variations and again at the end. The structure could, on the other hand, be heard as a ternary pattern: after the return of the sarabande theme in the middle of the piece, the key changes to D major and remains in that key long enough to form a distinct and substantial middle section before the return to D minor.

There is a similar situation with the variation techniques Bach uses. Did he really intend us to register all his inversions, retrogrades, retrograde inversions, diminutions and augmentations? As for the implied counterpoint, even the composer himself was probably unaware of such textural phenomena as the six-part texture analysts claim to have discovered in the fourteenth variation or the seven-part texture in the fortieth. Whatever one’s approach to it, however – as a monumental intellectual exercise at one extreme, a spontaneous improvisation at the other extreme, or as something more realistically in between – the Chaconne in D minor remains an indisputable masterpiece.