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On Bach's Chaconne and Arrangements Thereof

Great piece and all that. Don't really have much to say, except that the original doesn't really do it for me anymore, after hearing Busoni's arrangement for the piano. (No offense to Bach.) I'm sure it's wonderful, but something about the violin, with its thin, shrill tone, makes it unsuitable for solo recitals to my ears. And the score is just so infuriating to decipher. I don't know if it's more to do with Bach or with violin scores, but I can't make heads or tails of it. I honestly think Bach should have written this for the organ. (As John Cook, the author of an organ transcription, wrote as a preface to his work: "It is perhaps not unreasonable to suppose that Bach would have chosen the organ, had he transcribed the Chaconne himself, as the instrument best suited to the scale of his ideas.")

(On the flip side, maybe an organ transcription would be a bit excessive, especially if your taste in registers coincides with that of certain pretentious artists like Ton Koopman, who believe that any performance of Bach's organ works that doesn't issue from only the reeds or trumpets or whatever is inauthentic, and routinely shred works like the Passacaglia and Fugue or the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 549 that demand more subtlety and refinement than these dilettantes are capable of. The latter of these pieces sounds decidedly better on the piano, at least when compared to some organ performances I've heard. I would know, since I transcribed it for piano myself.)

Busoni's arrangement of the Chaconne is clearly written like his transcriptions of Bach's organ works (which is apparent when you listen to Busoni's arrangement played on an organ). It's decidedly Romantic, but he captures the spirit of Bach perfectly. That is why Busoni was the greatest transcriber of Bach's works for the piano, especially of the organ works, which sound frighteningly organlike. (Just listen to Michelangeli's hair-raising performance of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which sounds the more organlike due to the poor sound quality and the demonic sculptures in the video.)

Brahms wrote an arrangement of the Chaconne for left-hand alone, which he cleverly published as a "study" so that people would overlook its lack of charm. He wrote the following in a letter to Clara Schumann, with whom he was reportedly exploring the range of harmonies available to the human body, and whom Liszt totally hated: "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." This is funny, because Brahms' arrangement is so attenuate as to be almost a caricature of the original, and one gets the urge to thank any higher power in the vicinity that the inspiration for this piece chose to descend on Bach rather than Brahms.

Some say the Chaconne was a tombeau written in memory of Bach's first wife, but this is disputed. Regardless, we must accept the possibility that Bach may have chosen the violin precisely for the qualities which make it so unsuitable for public performances except in large groups (when it magically transforms into something awesome) - viz., the shrill, wailing tone, suggestive of a stark loneliness that is exactly the sort of feeling that would move a man to write a tombeau. So maybe the violin was not just something that Bach had to make do with when he didn't have an organ at hand.

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