It is in three-part form A-B-A , with the exalted middle section in the parallel major. It should not be surprising then, that the Chaconne has also inspired reworking by later musicians in a multitude of transcriptions and arrangements, nor that it has prompted extravagant theories about the inner nature of its mysteries. The German musicologist Helga Thoene has developed a theory that the entire Partita, and the Chaconne particularly, are full of coded references to death and to pertinent chorales.
All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy. Chaconne from Partita No. We change it so that it can continue to please us. From another perspective, of course, these myths are wrong. They overrule chronology and historical fact. They are filler that bridges the inevitable gaps in real history. They are often demonstrably untrue. Worse, when new historical information does become available, it is often ignored in favor of the more satisfying myths that have grown up around a beloved piece.
And so I can confess that as a listener to Mahler, I am a terrible historian. I am aware of the actual known details of the composition of the Sixth Symphony, yet I continue to insist upon hearing the Andante as a something grieving, meditation, premonition, panic attack about the death of someone innocent whom I was supposed to protect probably a child.
It proves impossible to separate the past from the past perfect progressive when reading the thoughts of a culture saint — der heiliger Gustav, patron saint of WebMD. With Mahler, such transformations all lean in one direction — toward death. At their most potent they go beyond the individual listener, affecting an entire audience or even a generation. A smile enters his life. Yet it is rare to find a performance from the second half of the 20th century that is any faster than 11 or 12 minutes, and many clock near an excruciating 14 — twice as slow as Mahler or Mengelberg.
Slow down any song to half its original tempo and it is likely to sound miserable. That in itself is something of a myth. The average tempo of the Adagietto had been dragging for decades.
Right or wrong, the effect was profound enough to stamp the Adagietto as a work of mourning. I would argue however that all tradition is false in the way Kaplan defines it. If something is demonstrably, historically true, then it does not need the sanctioning of a tradition. It was a love song, to Mengelberg, to Alma, and most likely to Mahler himself.
But to most of us, it is and has always been a lament. But this is to be expected of a figure like Mahler. He asked for it, composing autobiographically and insisting that music be a statement of personal beliefs.
No one of that era escapes the expressionist lens of existential fretting through which we prefer to view them. Bach, however, is a different sort. Artists of the early s 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. First set to paper at some point between and as the final movement of the violin partita No. Bach reveled in extremes, borrowing from other musicians and pushing his models to their technical limits; writing variations was a chance to show his stuff.
Bach, who took every opportunity to shatter the standing records longest, fastest, most notes, ugliest dissonance , was Blake Griffin, and his two most famous forays into this style the other being the massive passacaglia in C minor for organ were meant to be game-enders. Where Mahler left little room to push forward with the symphony, Bach fairly well ended the chaconne. After his expansive examples, there was no territory left to claim.
It would be years before the title began showing up again regularly, and then only in homage to Bach. He enjoyed the process of technical exhaustiveness and he enjoyed showing off. By , when Brahms writes to Clara Schumann about the Chaconne, the romantic proto-Mahlerian ideals of music as philosophy and autobiography had started to change the meaning of the piece:.
Using the technique adapted to a small instrument the man writes a whole world of the deepest thought and most powerful feeling. If I could picture myself writing, or even conceiving, such a piece, I am certain that the extreme excitement and emotional tension would have driven me mad. For the Romantics, a great piece of art was a psychological sucker punch, knocking loose some terrifying unconfronted truth.
Brahms was not the last to approach it this way. The worlds were getting larger and the thoughts deeper. For the first half of the 20th century most listeners to radio or records experienced the Chaconne not as a set of violin variations, or as the final movement of a suite, but as a stand-alone monument in either the Busoni or the Stokowksi versions — slow, deep, terrifying, primordial.
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 s 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. Play from the soul, not like a trained bird! Since a musician cannot move others unless he himself is moved, he must of necessity feel all of the affects that he hopes to arouse in his listeners.
He communicates his own feelings to them. For him, depicting an emotion was like rendering any other natural object. 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. Having had no opportunity to mourn her, Bach composed the Chaconne as an impassioned lament.
This was the story my students told, and it is a great one. It makes sense to us that such an unfair shock of fate upon homecoming, unthinkable in our era of incessant status updates, must elicit in a great composer some audible act of grieving. Furthermore, my students were prepared to graft this emotional trajectory onto the big sections of the work, and specific emotional turns onto each variation.
All were convincing if the premise was accepted. Napoleon or Mozart dying while composing the Requiem. Instrumental music attained greater prominence, additionally bolstered by the presence of virtuosos. Consequently, not only are BWV considered the utmost in virtuosic art, but so are the cello suites BWV , especially in light of how unique they are.
Like the cello suites, Sei Solo demonstrated that Bach was intimately familiar with both the musical language typical of certain instruments as well as the related playing techniques.
He opted to forego an accompanying bass line, but this did not prevent Bach from combining tightly woven counterpoint and sophisticated harmonies with unusual and well-formulated rhythmic accents, especially in the dance movements.
The compositional tools used here are a combination of a solo melodic line supported by chords, pure monophony and polyphony projected into both monophony as well as specific polyphony.
The constraint in form does not come across as a shortcoming, but rather as the result of the greatest compositional focus and inspiration. The chaconne, a dance which hails from Latin America and actually has a light-hearted character, made its way from Spain to Italy and France as part of guitar repertoire and is closely related to the passacaglia. Two forms of the chaconne emerged: the Italian form and the French form , and the bass is the decisive element which runs through vocal and instrumental pieces as a melody.
Differences are evident in how the bass is used: French composers deployed it freely, whereas the Italians strictly pursued an ostinato technique. German composers such as Heinrich Ignaz Biber and Dietrich Buxtehude composed their bass voice primarily in keeping with the Italian style of composition, but they followed the form of the French model in elements such as the three-part structure and dotted rhythms. In the Chaconne from Partita No.
In his chaconne, Bach appears to have strategically integrated elemental motifs of musical expression. Diatonics and chromatics are juxtaposed, as are major and minor, not to mention arpeggios and scale passages.
Another impressive aspect of the chaconne is the large number of measures: with a total of measures, it has more than all of the other four movements of the partita together.
The theme in the bass occurs as a lamento bass D-C-B flat-A. In the course of the first part, this form converts into a chromatic fourth, and both forms interchange in the course of the Chaconne. Bach varies the theme in the bass at intervals of four measures each; there are 64 variations altogether. The gradual abbreviation of the parts facilitates the intensified cadence at the end of each part so it begins earlier and earlier than in the previous part. The approaches to analysing the Chaconne are as complex and multi-facetted as the piece itself.
Whilst some musicologists focus on the variations of the theme in the bass , others attempt to unearth other levels. Harmonic analyses and studies about how the bass theme was developed make it possible to deconstruct the Chaconne in a way that allows us to find an interpretation.
Many academic papers have drawn upon the numerological aspects which may have influenced the composition process. For example, the piece has a symmetrical structure in that the theme is presented twice followed by 30 variations each. Bach used this pattern in the Goldberg Variations as well. The question arises as to whether this is a coincidence or if the number 30 has any significance.
Another approach involves the relevance of number 4. Not only are there four measures in every variation, leading to a square of 64, the violin has four strings.
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