STADTFELD - CHACONNE TRANSCRIBED FROM PARTITA NO 2 PIANO

Feared, respected and loved. Touchstone, limit experience and temptation. One of the greatest, most mysterious works in music history to date is the Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach, a work composed for the violin and transcribed several times for the piano, a work played by orchestras, organists and guitarists, cellists and drummers.

In the summer of 1720 Bach returned from Karlovy Vary after a business trip lasting 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 started composing a partita for solo violin. The key: dark, D minor. The first four movements are 155 bars long, but the fifth, the chaconne, is beyond the scope. It stretches over 257 bars and revolves around several choral themes dealing with death and resurrection. As later in the Goldberg Variations, Bach places the main theme in the bass part, and both works are based on a saraband rhythm. Robert Schumann worked on the chaconne 1853 for violin with an obligatory piano part, and Johannes Brahms designed a version for piano around 1877, "An exercise for the left hand", as he called it. The Chaconne occupies the most prominent place in Ferruccio Busani's Bach arrangements published between 1916 and 1919 . Busoni formed a sophisticated concert piece from the template, with opulent, organ-like timbres. At first he had even thought of an orchestral version, but then changed his mind.

When Martin Stadtfeld was asked to put this version of Busoni on the program for a concert in Asia, he noticed, in spite of all admiration, "that this editing did not go with my feelings emotionally, because every transcription already contains part of the interpretation." So Stadtfeld began to look for a way to determine his inner resistance. Busoni's version seemed too bombastic, too virtuosic, too massive. Naturally, 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 about his processing is Stadtfeld that he "found different colors for the respective parts".

Stadtfeld does not want to exclude that there was already an earlier form of this chaconne in Bach's world of thought . Of course, like so much with Bach, this cannot be demonstrated. "But some nesting in major reminds me of his earlier organ works and the circle around the empty strings is known from the D minor toccata." Bach had already written this 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 should also have arisen in Arnstadt.

Martin Stadtfeld's close relationship to Bach's oeuvre has been going on for many years and is documented in a number of CDs. He also turned his attention to the less popular Bach and continued some of its unfinished designs. From the first additional canonical material for the "Goldberg Variations" found in 1976, he developed the series of previously known variations in close motivic terms. 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 on the Chopin etudes, have at least an indirect Bach reference.