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JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
trans. FERRUCCIO BUSONI (1866–1924) Chaconne from Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin in D Minor, BWV 1004
Ferruccio Busoni was one of the great pianists of history, because he was also a composer and conductor and brought not only diversity but also an enormous maturity to his vir- tuosity. Samuel Beckett said of Proust’s characters that they were like giants buried in the ages, touching the past and the future at the same time. Busoni was like that. He transcribed for piano some of Bach’s choral preludes, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and a vast arrangement of Bach’s incomplete final fugue from The Art of the Fugue, called the Fantasia Contrappuntistica.
But he also transcribed Liszt, Mozart, and even Schoenberg.
He was friends on one hand with Schnabel and Sorabji, and on the other with Varèse and Schoenberg. He wrote atonal music, and taught composition to the witty and underappre- ciated cabaret composer Kurt Weill.
So what he brought to Bach’s monumental Chaconne was more than just Bach, and more than bravura. He gets the orchestral splendor of this cathedral of a piece, from its meditative recitative to its organlike summits. His use of octaves and scales is only what Bach would have done, had Bach had a modern piano. Busoni understands the concept of organ stops—that is, the ability to play on pipes that sound like flutes, violins, reeds, a celeste, the oboe, the bombarde,
a clarinet, the diapason, and the giant bass bourdon. Bach’s own organ at the Thomaskirche was a typical Baroque organ with only around 63 stops (knobs that you pull out to unblock or unstop the attached pipe to create a specific sound). Busoni certainly pulls out all the stops and finds at the end of the D-minor storm a simple, clear day.
The great miracle is that Bach originally assembled an entire orchestra, an organ, the entire spectrum of a concert piano, on the four strings of a violin.
242 The Music at Tippet Rise