Martin Stadtfeld
Chaconne
Feared, respected and loved. Touchstone, limit experience and temptation. One of the greatest works in music history, and one of the most mysterious to this day, is Johann Sebastian Bach's Chaconne, a work composed for the violin and transcribed several times for the piano, a work played by orchestras, by organists and guitarists, by cellists and drummers.
In the summer of 1720 Bach returned home from Karlsbad after a business trip of several months. What he didn't know: He came back as a widower. Maria Barbara, his wife, had died shortly before. Bach could only say goodbye to her at the grave. A little later he began to compose a partita for solo violin.
The key: gloomy, D minor. The first four movements have a length of 155 bars, but the fifth, the chaconne, breaks the mold. It spans 257 bars and revolves around several chorale themes dealing with death and resurrection.
As later in the Goldberg Variations, Bach moves the main theme to the bass voice, and both works are based on a sarabande rhythm. Robert Schumann arranged the Chaconne for violin with piano obbligato part in 1853, and around 1877 Johannes Brahms designed a version for piano, "An exercise for the left hand", as he called it. In Ferruccio Busani's Bach arrangements published between 1916 and 1919, the chaconne occupies the most prominent place. Busoni formed a demanding concert piece from the template, with opulent, organ-like timbres. At first he even thought of an orchestral version, but then changed his mind.
When Martin Stadtfeld was asked to include this Busoni version in the program for a concert appearance in Asia, he noticed, despite all the admiration, "that this arrangement did not go emotionally with my feelings. Because every transcription already contains a part of the interpretation." So Stadtfeld began to look for where his inner resistance could be pinned down. Busoni's version seemed too bombastic, too virtuoso, too bulky. Of course, Stadtfeld's version also emphasizes the bass foundation, whose rhythmic structure contains "something archaic" for him, especially in connection with the interval of the fifth - the interval in which a violin is tuned. What is important to Stadtfeld about his work is that he "found different colors for the respective parts, which are intended to differentiate them from one another".
Stadtfeld does not want to rule out the possibility that there was an earlier form of this chaconne in Bach's mind. Of course, like so much with Bach, this cannot be proven. "But some interlockings in major remind me of his earlier organ works and the circling around the open strings is familiar from the D minor toccata." Bach had already written these during his time in Arnstadt, where he was employed from 1703. Finally, Stadtfeld recognizes in the bass dominance of the Chaconne a spiritual closeness to the C minor Passacaglia BWV 582, which was probably also written in Arnstadt.
Martin Stadtfeld's close relationship to Bach's oeuvre stretches back over many years and is documented in a series of CDs. He also turned his attention to the less popular Bach and updated some of his unfinished drafts. From the first additional canonical material for the "Goldberg Variations" found in 1976, he further developed the series of previously known variations in close motivic relationships. In addition, Stadtfeld often integrates small improvisations into his concert programs that are based on Bach's themes or, as in the case of the preludes and interludes to the Chopin Etudes, at least have an indirect reference to Bach.