Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 (arr. for piano left-hand by Brahms)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

The magnificent Chaconne that concludes the Partita No. 2 for Unaccompanied Violin is some of the most intense music Bach ever wrote, and it has worked its spell on musicians everywhere over the last two and a half centuries. The violin is a linear instrument, and the full harmonic textures implied in the original seem to cry out for performances that can project these more satisfactorily than can the solo violin. Schumann and Mendelssohn both wrote piano accompaniments for Bach's solo violin music, and the Chaconne itself has been transcribed for many other instruments and combinations of instruments. But the most distinctive transcription was made by Johannes Brahms, who arranged it for left hand only.

Brahms knew and loved the music of Bach at a time when it was still primarily a historical curiosity to audiences (and to many professional musicians): in Vienna he conducted the St. Matthew Passion and several of the cantatas, and he edited works by two of Bach's sons. For the Chaconne in particular Brahms felt an admiration that left him almost helpless. In 1877, the same year he composed his Second Symphony, Brahms made his piano transcription of the Chaconne and sent a copy to Clara Schumann. The letter that accompanied the manuscript is worth quoting at length:

The Chaconne is in my opinion one of the most wonderful and incomprehensible pieces of music. Using the technique adapted to a small instrument the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. 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. If one has no supremely great violinist at hand, the most exquisite of joys is probably simply to let the Chaconne ring in one's mind. But the piece certainly inspires one to occupy oneself with it somehow . . . There is only one way in which I can secure undiluted joy from the piece, though on a small and only approximate scale, and that is when I play it with the left hand alone . . . The same difficulty, the nature of the technique, the rendering of the arpeggios, everything conspires to make me-feel like a violinist!

The final note is important: the Chaconne is rigorous violin music, and Brahms preserves some of that discipline by making the transcription for left hand only. In contrast to the Busoni arrangement, which uses both hands and aims for an almost organ-like voluptuousness of sound, Brahms limits himself to the resources of five fingers. There may have been a purely academic reason for this-Brahms occasionally made transcriptions of other composers' music for one hand just to improve his technique in that hand-but more likely Brahms was drawn to Bach's ability to wring so much from the relatively limited resources of the solo violin and wished to present himself a similar compositional challenge. And it should be noted that Brahms did compose music of his own that fuses the intellectual rigor with the emotional depth of the Chaconne when he composed the passacaglia-finale to his Fourth Symphony eight years after making this transcription.

A chaconne is one of the most disciplined forms in music: it is built on a ground bass in triple meter over which a melodic line is repeated and varied. Here the four-bar ground bass repeats 64 times during the quarter-hour span of the Chaconne, and over it Bach spins out gloriously varied music, all the while keeping these variations firmly anchored on the ground bass. At the center section Bach moves into D major, and here the music relaxes a little, content to sing happily for awhile; after the calm nobility of this interlude, the quiet return of D minor sounds almost disconsolate. Bach drives the Chaconne to a great climax and a restatement of the ground melody at the close.