In December 1717, Johann Sebastian Bach left the employment of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar, where he had served as chamber musician and organist for the previous nine years. It was not a cordial parting. Tensions between Bach and his employer had been escalating for several years, there had been resentments on both sides, and the rupture was serious: the Duke apparently placed Bach under house arrest for his final month in Weimar and gave him the going-away present of an “unfavorable discharge.”

Bach did not care, for he had secured what looked like an ideal new position as music director at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, about sixty miles northwest of Weimar, but the move would bring many changes musically. The Cöthen court was strictly Calvinist in its observances and would not for an instant have tolerated the organ music and cantatas Bach had composed for Weimar. However, his new employer–Prince Leopold–was an enthusiastic musician, an enlightened ruler who played violin, viola da gamba, and clavier and who maintained a seventeen-member private orchestra, which he was glad to put at Bach’s disposal. Bach–who once said that music exists for two purposes: the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul–spent six years refreshing his soul in Cöthen. From this period came the great bulk of his secular instrumental music, including the Brandenburg Concertos, several of the orchestral suites, the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and the works for unaccompanied cello and for unaccompanied violin.

Bach was famed in his own day as a virtuoso organist, and–like virtually all composers of his era–he also played the violin. Very probably he played in the orchestra at Cöthen, but it is known that he preferred to play viola in chamber music, and in fact we know nothing about Bach’s skill as a violinist: his biographer Phillipp Spitta has noted that in all of the writings about Bach by family and contemporaries, there is not one mention of his ability as a violinist. What is indisputable, however, is that his understanding of the instrument was profound. The three sonatas and three partitas for unaccompanied violin, composed about 1720, represent one of the summits of the violin literature: not only are they great music in their own right (and this is wonderful music when played on any instrument), but they also confront the fundamental problem facing any composer who writes for solo violin, which is that the violin–unlike a keyboard instrument–cannot really play more than two notes at once. Within that limitation, a composer must find a way to provide a harmonic foundation for this essentially linear instrument over the span of an extended work.

Bach does not simply confront this problem–he annihilates it. For this linear instrument he creates the effect of a fully-realized harmonic texture with rolled chords, broken chords, multiple-stopping, and a complex polyphonic interweaving of voices. The effect of sounding a chord and then leaping away to resume the melodic line in another register can seem stark, almost fierce, and some listeners have found this music–amazing as it is–very difficult listening. In the nineteenth century, Mendelssohn and Schumann wrote piano accompaniments for these works–they saw what Bach was getting at musically but felt the solo violin inadequate to that task and so wanted to “help” the music by “completing” the harmonies (embarrassed by the existence of these arrangements and what they imply, the editor of the modern edition of Schumann’s works has refused to include them or to publish them in any form). Beyond this, these works are virtuoso music for the violin in the best sense–they require not just good musicianship but good violin-playing: the ability to sustain a long melodic line, to chord cleanly, to keep complex polyphonic textures absolutely clear, and to master the technical complexities of this music, which occur at both very fast and very slow speeds. We may not know much about Bach’s abilities as a violinist, but few composers have understood the instrument, its strengths, and its possibilities as well as he did.

It has become a matter of verbal convenience to speak of Bach’s “six solo sonatas,” but he distinguished carefully between the sonatas and partitas, and so should we. The three sonatas are all in sonata di chiesa (“church sonata”) form, a set of four movements in slow-fast-slow-fast sequence, which Bach may have encountered in the violin sonatas of Arcangelo Corelli. The opening slow movement is serious and sometimes improvisational in character, while the second is always a fugue. The third movement, always slow, is in all the sonatas the one movement in a different key from the other three. The last movement, very fast and in binary form, has a perpetual-motion brilliance to the writing. The structure of the partitas is more complex. As that name implies, it is a form made up of “parts,” and that title has come to be used almost interchangeably with the name suite. As a (very general) rule, Bach’s partitas are collections of between five to seven movements in dance forms that incorporate the expected suite sequence of allemande-courante-sarabande-gigue, but in all three partitas Bach makes changes in this basic pattern. One should be very careful of the old generalization that sonatas are “serious” music while partitas are lighter and intended to entertain: there are very serious movements in his partitas and movements in the sonatas that are absolutely charming. Take these outlines of form in the most general sense–this is music that needs to be understood on its own compelling terms rather than pushed into patterns for the sake of easy understanding.

Shrouded in wistfulness, all the movements of this partita are in a minor key. Bach’s manuscript originates from 1720, the year in which he returned from a journey to the unexpected news that his wife, Maria Barbara, was dead and buried. Even if Bach had already composed this partita, it is not hard to imagine that the music gained a whole different meaning for him after the death of his wife.

The Partita No. 2 in D Minor has become the most famous of Bach’s six works for unaccompanied violin, for it concludes with the Chaconne, one of the pinnacles of the violin literature. Before this overpowering conclusion, Bach offers the four basic movements of partita form, all in binary form. The opening Allemande is marked by a steady flow of sixteenth-notes occasionally broken by dotted rhythms, triplets, and the sudden inclusion of thirty-second notes. The Courante alternates a steady flow of triplets within dotted duple meters. The Sarabande proceeds along double and triple stops and a florid embellishment of the melodic line, while the Gigue races along cascades of sixteenth-notes in 12/8 time; the theme of the second part is a variation of the opening section.

While the first four movements present the expected partita sequence, Bach then springs a surprise by closing with a chaconne longer that the first four movements combined. The Chaconne offers some of the most intense music Bach ever wrote, and it has worked its spell on musicians everywhere for the last two and a half centuries: beyond the countless recordings for violin, it is currently available in performances by guitar, cello, lute, and viola, as well as in piano transcriptions by Brahms, Busoni, and Raff.

A chaconne is a series of variations on a continually repeated short bass line, which in this Ciaccona is a four-bar motif. First, we hear the theme twice as the foundation for broad chords, and then the journey begins, travelling along a passage of arpeggios and rapid notes back to the opening chords. Then there is a sudden fascinating transition to major, like a heavenly light. Afterwards, we return to earth, like a different person, to finally arrive at the beginning – which does indeed sound very different.

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. A chaconne demands great skill from a performer under any circumstances, but it becomes unbelievably complex on the unaccompanied violin, which must simultaneously suggest the ground bass and project the melodic variations above it. Even with the flatter bridge and more flexible bow of Bach’s day, some of this music borders on the unplayable, and it is more difficult still on the modern violin, with its more rounded bridge and concave bow.

This makes Bach’s Chaconne sound like supremely cerebral music–and it is–but the wonder is that this music manages to be so expressive at the same time. 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 to D minor sounds almost disconsolate. Bach drives the Chaconne to a great climax and concludes on a restatement of the ground melody.

In the final note, we hear the same note played twice, on two strings at the same time. Two notes that have eventually become one again: after all that has preceded, there is something comforting about it. And maybe that was also the case for Bach himself, in his grief.

THE CHACONA

Adapted from the program notes written by Eric Bromberger of La Jolle Music Society.