Bach-Busoni - Chaconne in D minor

- Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 -- 28 July 1750) - Performer: Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli - Year of recording: 1949 Chaconne {Ciaccona}, transcription for piano in D minor (after J. S. Bach, BWV 1004), KiV B24. Bach’s original solo violin composition written in 1717-1723, piano transcription written by Ferruccio Busoni in 1893. On a day in May 1888, hearing the organist of the Leipzig Thomaskirche play Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D, Frau Kathi Petri, mother of the great pianist and future Busoni “disciple,“ Egon Petri, suggested to the young Busoni that he arrange it for piano; a week later, and without writing it down, he played it for her. Thus began the series of Bach-Busoni transcriptions, recensions, editions, and Bach-based compositions which would occupy the composer to the end of his life. Exploring the difficulties and opportunities of accommodating Bach to the heavily strung, more powerfully resonant pianos, equipped with Steinway’s new sostenuto pedal, Busoni fashioned a superhuman technique which would make him perhaps the most titanic pianist after Liszt. “Bach is the foundation of pianoforte playing,“ he wrote,“ Liszt the summit. The two make Beethoven possible“ -- possible, that is, to articulate the grandeurs of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier“ Sonata, Op. 106, or the final Sonata, Op. 111. It was inevitable, therefore, that Busoni should have seized upon the great D minor Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2, BWV. 1004, which stands apart from the preludes, dances, and fugues of the partitas and sonatas for solo violin in sustained richness of invention and sheer magnificence. Schumann, Mendelssohn, Raff, Siloti, and Brahms, among others, left arrangements of the Chaconne, Brahms’ being a useful study for the left hand alone. Busoni’s transcription was written in Boston in 1892, during a brief tenure as professor of piano at the New England Conservatory. Bach opens with an imposing, saraband-like theme which establishes at once a plane of high seriousness, to return in the middle of the piece, and again to round it off at the end -- three mighty formal pillars -- between which the Chaconne unfolds in some twenty-nine brief yet telling variations whose cumulative effect is a whelming splendor. Busoni matches their expressive gamut with directions ranging from dolce tranquillo to con fuoco animato as he finds pianistic equivalents for what could only be suggested on the violin. The chaconne ground bass, for instance -- sketched by Bach in fleetingly detached tones and double-stops -- Busoni makes explicit (though not in every variation, and not always in the bass), thereby using the work’s own logic to enriching piano texture. In a note to his edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Busoni explicitly states that he has treated his effects “from the standpoint of organ tone.“ Scholar and pianist Larry Sitsky glosses this as meaning that “Busoni it as an organ piece then transcribed it....“ Both the organ’s rounded fullness of tone and clarity of registration are made available to the adept pianist by Busoni’s widely spaced parts and predominant use of octaves and open fourths, fifths, and sixths for sonority. Bach’s essential linearity, his inexhaustible melodic transformation, is never compromised, but adroitly amplified. Critics and commentators have been concerned by what might be termed the inauthentic nature of transcription (practiced by a mere virtuoso, the sneer runs, upon the mighty Bach). In a thoughtful essay on the art of transcription, Busoni gave a detailed reply. Bach himself, he says, was one of the most prolific arrangers of his own and others’ music. And he adds that “notation is itself the transcription of an abstract idea. The moment the pen takes possession of it the thought loses its original form.“ In his transcription of the Chaconne, Busoni has taken possession of Bach’s idea and realized, with unrivaled power and pianistic resourcefulness, what had been merely implicit in the violin solo. A divination: a triumph.