I keep seeing people sharing their playlists and I wanted to share mine too so I started thinking about what music I’ve been listening to lately. So I started thinking about what I’ve been listening to over the last few weeks and realized I’ve been listening to books and the Bach Chaconne…and that’s pretty much it. So I thought I would share a little bit about the piece like I did with the Tzigane several years ago when I was borderline obsessed with that piece. Plus, my mom told me she enjoyed listening to all the different versions and surely she can’t be the only one, right?

I referenced this piece in my Silver Linings Post a few weeks because I’ve finally mustered the courage to work on it but now it has turned into more of an obsession. I know that not everyone who reads my blog is a violinist so here is some history, theory, and a whole bunch of performances so you can see for yourself what is so great, and also so you can see how it can sound so different depending on who is playing it, but still so fantastic.

First of all, what is a Chaconne?

According to everyone’s favorite research tool, Wikipedia:

A chaconne is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line (ground bass) which offers a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention. In this it closely resembles the passacaglia.
The ground bass, if there is one, may typically descend stepwise from the tonic to the dominant pitch of the scale; the harmonies given to the upper parts may emphasize the circle of fifths or a derivative pattern thereof.

What about THIS Chaconne?

The encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say about Bach’s famous work:

The Chaconne forms the longest movement of the piece by far, making up roughly half of the entire partita. It draws upon the Baroque dance form known as a chaconne, in which a basic theme stated at the opening is then restated in several variations. In Bach’s Chaconne, the basic theme is four measures long, short and simple enough to allow for 64 variations. From a stern and commanding mood at the beginning, Bach gradually increases the complexity of his theme, mixing in various compositional effects. Some twists upon the theme are spacious and grand; others flow nimbly. Fast runs and large interval skips are frequent, requiring much dexterity from the performer. Bach also calls forth changes in emotional intensity, as some variations are dominated by long notes and others by many, more urgent short notes. Bach builds up his work over 256 measures, finally restating the theme at the end with new, even stronger harmonies.

A Little History:

Bach composed the chaconne sometime between 1718 and 1720. Historians speculate that Bach composed it after returning from a trip to find his wife (and the mother of seven of his children) Maria Barbara dead and buried.

According to the obituary co-authored by Carl Philipp Emanuel and Bach student Johann Friedrich Agricola, Maria Barbara's death in 1720 was sudden and unexpected. Bach was at the Carlsbad spa accompanying his employer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, when she died. When Bach left Köthen, Maria Barbara was in perfectly good health; but when he returned two months later, he was shocked to learn that she had died and been buried on 7 July. The cause of her death is undocumented. Professor Helga Thoene proposed that Bach's famous Violin Partita No. 2 (especially the final "Chaconne" movement) was written as a tombeau for Maria Barbara, however these claims are controversial.

Professor Thoene’s line of thinking resonates with the modern listener. A few summers ago while I was studying with violin teacher extraordinaire Felicia Moye at summer camp, I was introduced to Professor Thoene’s theory. It shines such a poignant and moving light on the piece, that it was composed in response to the death of his wife. There is so much emotion contained in the music that it demands a story. Otherwise, it leaves us all wondering “why” and “how.”

In the excellent article titled, “The New Mythologies: Deep Bach, Saint Mahler, and the Death Chaconne,” author Michael Markham gives some context to our modern notions, and the evolution of those ideas. Here are a few excerpts that wonderfully sum up the concept:

Artists of the early 1700s did not wear their lives on their sleeves, and we do not invest the era with particular psychocultural significance. Their goal was not to expose the hidden and the personal but to replicate the empirical and the universal; their domain was not the unconscious but the observable world. Whatever “truth” might be recoverable about the original motivation behind the Chaconne will be rooted in that culture, not ours. To be a canonical work, however, means to outlive your birth era, and so the Chaconne has undergone a number of emotional transformations since Bach’s lifetime.
There is no evidence that Bach himself considered the Chaconne to encode an entire vista of the universe or to sound out his own emotional depths. Such Romantic notions would never have occurred to a court composer who had trained in the late 1600s as a Lutheran town organist. Creating art then and there was not an act of personal expression but one of civic or religious service. Of course emotions could be depicted and messages delivered. But musicians of Bach’s generation did not need to feel an emotion in order to depict it. It was the next generation, beginning with Bach’s own son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who began to demand that a musician express emotions in a way we would call “authentic”:
The aspirations, motivations, and meanings that have since accrued to Bach’s works, and in particular to the Chaconne, have been filtered through others — Brahms, Busoni, and Stokowski — and are not Bach’s but theirs and ours. But to say this is not to dismiss such meanings. I experience them, enjoy them, rely on them in my own listening. There is no crime in that, nor any mistake or shallowness. It is inevitable, normal, and necessary. That is consumption history. We select it because it pleases us. We change it so that it can continue to please us.

Speaking of Brahms… in a letter to Clara Schumann, he described the Chaconne like this:

“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind. If one doesn’t have the greatest violinist around, then it is well the most beautiful pleasure to simply listen to its sound in one’s mind.”

Back to Markham….

The Chaconne had become both broader (“a whole world”) and deeper (its “emotional tension” putting your very psyche at stake). Brahms wrote this while reworking Bach’s violin piece as a left-hand-only piano étude, a process that for him bordered on the mystical. In the century since Bach’s death, Kant, then Beethoven, had given us the Romantic sublime, and musical composers had become philosophers-in-notes. For the Romantics, a great piece of art was a psychological sucker punch, knocking loose some terrifying unconfronted truth. The technical grandeur of Bach’s Chaconne (and his newfound role as Großvater of German music) had given it Himalayan stature — immovable, ancient, a platform from which to survey the universe. Brahms was not the last to approach it this way.

In his article, Bach and Clinical Care: a proposition, Dr. John Edmund Spicer, a medical doctor, advocates for listening to the Bach, and specifically the Chaconne to be a better doctor.

“When we as clinicians listen to something as profound as the Chaconne, we are hearing the transmuted emotions of a great composer to which we respond emotionally and interpretively: we have two ways of responding. And that is just the same sort of task we face when listening to the stories of our patients, particularly the complex patients. I suggest the two areas of activity help each other.”

Some performance perspective:

In his book Violin Dreams, legendary violinist Arnold Steinhardt talks at length about the Chaconne, and his lifelong relationship with the piece. Below is an excerpt which I think beautifully sums up the violinists personal relationship with a piece that has taken on mythic proportions.

As far as I could see, my first task was to figure out how best to combine these ever-changing variations cohesively. I had not forgotten Isaac Stern's advice in violin camp years ago: think of the Chaconne's variations as occurring in groups, so that the evolution of thought and feeling unfolds convincingly. At the outset my course seemed relatively clear, since the early variations all came as matched pairs in which the second of each could be treated as a simple response to the first. But every now and again a lone variation would appear, begging me to direct it somewhere. These orphans vexed me. Did each belong with the next or the previous pair, or did they stand alone to freshen the palate between courses? The basso ostinato also perplexed me. This recurring bass line was supposed to do just that — to repeat endlessly without significant alteration and to serve as the work's distinctive theme. Yet Bach refused to stick consistently to the bass template he fashioned for the beginning and chose rather to draw from several quite distinctive and different ones.
Another characteristic trait of a chaconne is a regularly repeating harmonic structure. Here again I could easily recognize not one but three or four different patterns. It was as if Bach had begun a card game with hard-and-fast rules that he then changed at whim again and again during play. Even the most easily identifiable element of a chaconne, a dance-related emphasis on the second of the bar's three beats, appeared only sporadically. If I were to dance the Chaconne, where and how would I place my feet when the stress was not on the second beat?
I decided to put past considerations aside for the moment and try to look at the bigger picture. The Chaconne was divided into three large sections. The dark and brooding outer sections flanked a hymnlike inner one that evoked peace, gratitude, and optimism. Was it far-fetched to think that Bach, a devout Christian, might have offered the Chaconne as an expression of the Holy Trinity, its bedrock spiritual principle? The first section, in D minor, would represent the Father; the next, in D major, the Son; and the final section, in D minor, the Holy Spirit. This line of thought intrigued me, even though I was on shaky footing as a secular Jew with only the flimsiest knowledge of Christianity. The more I looked, however, the more "threes" I found. The Chaconne's basic building block was a three-beat bar, the initial theme appeared three times — at the beginning, the middle, and the end — and then there were those evocative three-note groups that appeared over and over again. Was the Chaconne some kind of message in a bottle destined for (dare I think it?) God?

Excerpted from Violin Dreams, by Arnold Steinhardt (Houghton Mifflin, October 11, 2006).

So, do you want to hear it now? This first video was created by 14 violinists during lockdown and it was kind of the impetus for writing this post. The rest of these are performances I think are incredible and/or are historically of note. I do have a favorite, but I’m not going to tell you which one it is. Can you guess?