Bach: Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin in D Minor, BWV 1004 - Analysis

Bach’s Second Violin Partita begins with the measured step of a dance and ends with one of the most imposing works ever written for unaccompanied violin: the Chaconne. Between those points, a single instrument can sound like a flowing melodic voice or suggest the weight of several voices at once. A low note hints at a bass line, the upper register carries the phrase forward, and a chord suddenly widens the violin’s world.

The four opening dances prepare the ear for this effect in different ways. The Allemanda moves at a measured pace; the Corrente gives its triple metre a more restless spring; the Sarabanda lets chords linger; and the Giga drives the music through quick, buoyant figures. Then comes the Ciaccona (Chaconne), an extended set of variations in which a familiar harmonic course remains perceptible beneath an astonishing variety of textures and rhythms.

The Partita stands fourth in Bach’s collection of six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin. The title page of the surviving autograph, held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, bears the date 1720. Bach was then employed at the court of Prince Leopold in Köthen. That date establishes when the manuscript of the collection was made; it does not give the exact moment when each piece was composed. The Partita’s first performance is also unknown.

Bach was extending an existing tradition of unaccompanied violin music. Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Passacaglia had already demonstrated how an entire movement could grow from a recurring bass figure. In Bach’s Second Partita, however, the harmony need not always be sounded as an unbroken bass line. Even in passages that seem to consist of a single stream of notes, low points of arrival and changes of direction allow the ear to piece together voices that the violin only implies.

Movements / Structure

The table keeps the Italian titles used in Bach’s score. Each of the first four dances has two repeated sections. The Ciaccona unfolds as one continuous set of variations.

The Giga closes with a cadence strong enough to end a suite. When the Chaconne follows, its broad opening chords give the fifth movement a weight out of all proportion to its place on the page of contents. In many performances, it accounts for about half the playing time.

Musical Analysis

I. Allemanda — Finding the bass within the line

The short upbeat sets up a phrase in D minor. As the first two bars unfold, the violin rises from a low note, moves through slurred sixteenths and drops again as the harmony changes. Later, a scattering of triplets briefly alters the flow. The low arrivals can be followed at a slower pace than the surrounding notes, as if a second player were stepping in at intervals. The suggestion of a bass is already present where the score gives the violin a single line.

A cadence in F major at bar 6 opens a brief window onto the relative major. The line continues towards A, the dominant, which has a chord and a pause to itself at the end of the first section. The upbeat returns for the second section, and the violin works through more densely packed sequential figures before settling in D minor. Both endings let listeners hear how Bach has shaped the journey. The rapid notes stop, and the pitch around which they have been gathering comes into focus.

The two sections also differ in the effect of their upbeats. A few notes are enough to establish D at the opening. When the second section begins, small rising and falling figures soon suggest that the ground has shifted. In both places, the upbeat launches the dance. On the second occasion, the phrase starts out with a less certain destination.

II. Corrente — A flexible triple metre

The first full bar of the Corrente (or Courante) gives its opening note the support of a second pitch. Eighth notes, triplets and dotted figures take off around that point of contact, stretching and compressing the dance’s stride. Bars 2–3 still turn around D while the melody is already moving on. The arrival in F major, so early in the Allemanda, is heard here around bar 12. Listening for those two arrivals side by side puts the family resemblance within reach even at the Corrente’s quicker pace.

The second section begins at bar 25 with a marked chromatic turn. The line gains momentum through changes of direction, leaps and longer runs of eighth notes. These groupings can carry the ear across a beat, even as the metre keeps its three-beat footing. At the close, the final D lasts longer than most of the notes that have led to it. The sense of coming to rest is written into the note values.

The bowing contributes to this flexibility. In bars 1–3, small slurs give separate impulses to quick notes. A little later the same metre can accommodate a longer run of eighth notes. The dance stays lively because its smaller phrases find different ways of crossing a pulse the ear can still follow.

III. Sarabanda — Time inside a chord

The Sarabanda opens on the beat, with a chord. In its first three bars Bach lets the lower notes lend weight to the phrase while the upper voice moves at a different pace. On the second beat of the first bar, a dotted value allows the music to settle into the step before completing it. The bow can move from the lower strings to the melody at the top, and for a moment the two parts of the chord have distinct roles in the phrase.

In bars 4–6, quick notes and a trill enter this unhurried space. In bars 19–21, the line gathers speed again and is brought to rest by chords. The second section has two endings. The first sends the player back through the repeat, while the second draws the dance to its final close in D minor. The slow tread and concentrated weight of the chords prepare the ear for a sound the Chaconne will explore on a far larger scale.

The alternate endings make a difference to the way the close is heard. With the repeats played, the first ending has already established where the phrase is likely to go. When it takes another route on the second pass, the final cadence gains weight from an expectation the dance has itself created.

IV. Giga — The dance that could end the suite

The 12/8 metre gives the Giga four large beats, each naturally divided into three. The upbeat springs into a figure that rises from the lower strings and turns down again. Groups of sixteenths fill out the motion from bar 3. The main pulse still holds, which gives the notes room to tumble across it. In bars 11–12, a similar figure moves from a lower range to a higher one, with p and f markings. The second bar answers the first with a sudden increase in weight.

Wider skips and chromatic inflections enliven the second section. From about bar 31, successive groups of fast notes course above moving lower pitches, gathering into the final cadence. Then the Chaconne begins. Where the Giga has trained the ear to hear several quick notes as one beat, a single chord in the Chaconne can occupy most of two.

In bars 25–26, a rising figure is heard again almost immediately at p. The marking puts a little distance between the phrases without interrupting the run of notes. Differences in pitch and weight give the Giga room to breathe even at its most continuously fast.

V. Ciaccona — Four bars, three large spans

The Chaconne starts on the second beat with a D-minor chord. The length of the chord and the short note that succeeds it establish the heavy tread of the 3/4 metre. In the first four-bar unit, the bass touches C-sharp and returns to D before working its way towards A, the dominant. The opening D of the next phrase completes the cadence. That span returns in bars 5–8, with more movement in the cadence. The dotted rhythm and two thirty-second notes at the end of the second statement prepare the rhythm of the variations that follow.

The variations change the pace of the surface while the ear continues to feel the interval between points of harmonic arrival. In bars 9–16, the dotted figure passes from lower to higher voices. In bars 17–24, the descent towards A acquires successive semitones, sharpening the pull towards the cadence. By bars 29–32, sixteenths have become nearly continuous. There are fewer chords, and the shorter notes make the line feel faster even when the underlying pulse stays steady.

In bars 33–36, the first note of each bar lies well below those that follow. These low arrivals can be heard as a slower line in their own right. Around bar 89, Bach introduces a different way of distributing the voices. He shows how the breaking of the chord begins and writes arpeggio. Much of what follows is written as stacked chords. The violinist’s choices about how the bow moves through the strings can make different notes emerge from the pattern. The motion of the bow is fast, while the harmony changes at a much slower rate.

Broad chords reappear around bar 126, preparing the close of the first large span. At bar 133, the key signature changes from one flat to two sharps and the music moves into D major. D remains the point of orientation. The F-sharp above it changes the quality of the tonic itself. Bach also clears space in the texture. A low note lingers in the ear while the upper line moves through small ornaments, so that the major mode arrives with a new lightness of movement as well as a new tonal colour.

The major section builds its own momentum. In bars 161–164, a repeated high A gives the ear a fixed point. By bars 173–176, repeated notes crowd into the chords themselves. Then the texture thins abruptly at bar 177, and the dotted rhythm of the opening returns in the major mode. In bars 201–208, arpeggio returns and the succession of chords grows more crowded. By bar 209, the ear has had time to hear D major as a territory in its own right. The change of key signature and the return of the weighty dotted rhythm now make the return to D minor immediately perceptible.

The last span is the shortest. Around bars 229–240, persistent upper notes and a moving line below make the strings sound as if they were answering each other. Bar 248 gathers the motion into one final ascent and descent. The opening chords become recognisable again at bar 249, and their changed surroundings give them the weight of a return. After a new cadence, bar 257 ends on a single sustained D.

Chaconne bar numbers follow the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, where the opening incomplete bar is counted as bar 1.

From four strings to the piano

The curve of a violin’s bridge affects how many strings the bow can sustain together. The bass of a chord is often heard a fraction before the top note, which can then carry the line onwards. In a passage with one note at a time, Bach creates a related effect through spacing. Low notes that recur at regular intervals can form one line in the ear while the higher notes form another. This is implied polyphony. In bars 33–36 of the Chaconne, the low line remains intelligible although the violin repeatedly leaves it to play notes much higher up.

Johannes Brahms transcribed the Chaconne for the left hand alone. The first chord sounds an octave below the violin original. One hand has to deliver the bass, the chords and the melody. The pianist chooses when to hold a note, when to spread a chord and where to place the next arrival. The piano gains the weight of its lower range while the physical concentration of the task remains perceptible.

Ferruccio Busoni made a concert transcription for two hands. He sets the opening chords low on the keyboard with octave reinforcement and a deeper bass, then takes advantage of the distance the melody can travel from there. In the passage corresponding to Bach’s bars 33–34, the two hands and their differing dynamics help bring out the exchange between high and low notes. In the D-major section, around the passage corresponding to Bach’s bars 138–142, Busoni asks for a low passage to sound quasi Tromboni, like trombones. The voices that the ear pieces together in the violin part acquire a new physical depth and duration on the piano. The difference is apparent from the first chord. Brahms concentrates the movement in one hand. Busoni reaches much further into the bass, where the sound can continue under what follows. Each transcription gives a different span and duration to relationships that the bow articulates from note to note.

🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work

From Köthen to the Recording Studio: The Chaconne’s Many Lives

An entry in the Köthen burial register bears the date 7 July 1720. It records the burial of Maria Barbara Bach, the composer’s first wife. Johann Sebastian had travelled to Karlsbad with his employer, Prince Leopold. According to the obituary written in 1754 by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and the musician and writer Johann Friedrich Agricola, Bach learned of her death only when he returned home: his wife had already been buried. The date of the burial is known; the exact day on which she died is not.

The year 1720 appears on another document of a very different kind: the title page of Bach’s manuscript of six sonatas and partitas for solo violin. Among them is the Second Partita, ending with the Ciaccona. Both documents belong to the same year, but they record different things. One establishes the date of a burial; the other dates a manuscript. Neither tells us whether the Chaconne was composed before or after Maria Barbara’s death, or whether Bach ever associated the music with her.

Meanwhile, the Chaconne had another history to make: its journey into public concert life. On 8 February 1840, at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, the violinist Ferdinand David performed it with Felix Mendelssohn at the piano. It was among the earliest documented public performances of the piece, though not quite in the form Bach had written. Mendelssohn improvised an accompaniment, and Robert Schumann, reviewing the concert, remarked on the wealth of voices the piano brought to the music. A work for one violin was being heard alongside a second instrument, capable of sustaining and enriching harmonies that the violin could only suggest.

David’s pupil Joseph Joachim, one of the leading violinists of the nineteenth century, later helped carry the Chaconne to a wider audience. Johannes Brahms heard Joachim play it repeatedly. Wanting to experience the music at the keyboard without entirely setting aside the physical demands of Bach’s violin writing, Brahms arrived at an unusual solution: a transcription for the left hand alone. In June 1877, he wrote about it to the pianist and close friend Clara Schumann. The transcription appeared in print at the end of 1878.

Ferruccio Busoni took a different approach. His two-handed piano transcription expanded the music into the keyboard’s lower registers and a rich, almost orchestral sonority. He presented it publicly in Boston on 30 January 1893. Within a few decades, the Chaconne had travelled from solo violin to violin with piano accompaniment and on to two strikingly different piano versions: Brahms’s concentrated one-handed arrangement and Busoni’s expansive concert transcription.

Another question would eventually turn attention back to Köthen in 1720. The musicologist Helga Thoene identified melodic figures in the Chaconne that she interpreted as allusions to Lutheran chorales. In a study published in 2001, she proposed that the piece might be a tombeau, a musical memorial to Maria Barbara. It remains an intriguing but disputed interpretation. Bach’s manuscript contains no such dedication, and the obituary does not say that he wrote the Chaconne in mourning for his wife.

In 2001, Thoene’s hypothesis acquired a sound of its own on Morimur, a recording by the violinist Christoph Poppen and the Hilliard Ensemble. The album includes the Chaconne for violin alone and, later, a version in which four singers perform the chorale lines Thoene believed to be concealed within it. Those voices are not written into Bach’s score: they are a musical realization of an interpretation. Almost three centuries after the Köthen burial entry, the Chaconne was still inviting new ways of listening, even as the question of its connection with Maria Barbara remained unanswered.

🎧 Listening Guide

The opening pair. In the Allemanda, the notes at the bottom of the violin’s line give away the points at which the harmony changes. In the Corrente, similar points of arrival come after quicker groups of notes. The first audible arrival in F major is a good place to bring the two openings into focus.

From Sarabanda to Giga. The bow’s movement through the first chord of the Sarabanda takes the ear from its low support to the melody. In the Giga, four large beats remain easy to tap, even when the violin has six notes to a beat. The space between the end of the Giga and the first chord of the Chaconne makes the difference in the weight of their pulses especially clear.

The Chaconne on a large scale. Around bar 89, the first long stretch of arpeggiation makes it possible to hear how slowly the harmonies turn beneath the fast motion of the bow. At bar 133, the lighter texture helps announce D major. At bar 209, the character of the opening rhythm helps identify the return to D minor.

The last return on a second listen. After the sweep of bar 248, the chords once again call up the opening. Comparing the two statements brings out how differently the same rhythm can register after the long journey between them.

🎶 Further Listening

  • Shunske Sato — In the Netherlands Bach Society’s Haarlem recording, a period violin and pointed articulation make each dance’s footing distinct. The Chaconne offers a clear chance to follow low and high notes within a single running line. All of Bach
  • Hilary Hahn — Hahn takes more time over the Chaconne in her Sony recording. The sustained upper line is especially worth following where the violin is most heavily occupied with chords. Hilary Hahn Plays Bach
  • Augustin Hadelich — Hadelich uses a Baroque bow in his complete Warner recording. Heard in a single performance, the spring of the Corrente and the broad chordal tread of the finale make a revealing comparison. Bach – Sonatas & Partitas

📚 Further Reading

  • Joel Lester — Bach’s Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance, chapter 6. Lester’s comparison of how the dances begin makes it easier to hear what ties the Partita together.
  • Robert Whitehouse Eshbach — Joseph Joachim and Bach’s Chaconne. Concert programmes, press reports and correspondence tell the story of the work’s move into the nineteenth-century concert hall. 
  • Carmelo de los Santos — Performance-Practice Issues of the Chaconne from Partita II, BWV 1004, by Johann Sebastian Bach. This study shows how differently a passage can sound when violinists change the distribution of a chord or the bowing of an arpeggio. 
  • Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber — Passacaglia in G Minor, “The Guardian Angel”. Its recurring four-note descent offers a point of comparison with the more flexible treatment of the bass in Bach’s Chaconne.
  • Johann Sebastian Bach — Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007. A different unaccompanied string instrument carries dances and suggests the underlying harmony through the shape of a line.
  • Niccolò Paganini — Caprice No. 24 in A Minor, Op. 1. This much shorter variation cycle brings changes in the violin’s technique firmly into the foreground.
  • Béla Bartók — Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117. The opening Tempo di ciaccona brings the weight of the old dance and polyphonic writing for one violin into a twentieth-century musical language.

🎼 Closing Reflection

The low note has already fallen silent when the next one sounds high above it. For a moment, one is held in memory and the other in the air. When the bow comes back, the sound that seemed to be an echo has a place in the phrase.

📖 Bibliography and Sources

The analysis compares Bach’s autograph with the critical text of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe. The piano transcriptions are considered through their scores. For the account of Maria Barbara’s death, the principal documents are the Köthen burial entry and the 1754 obituary. Studies and recordings trace the Chaconne’s form, its emergence in public concerts and the interpretations it has acquired since.

Scores

Johann Sebastian Bach — Sei Solo a Violino senza Basso accompagnato. Libro Primo. Autograph, 1720, D-B Mus.ms. Bach P 967, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Digitised manuscript

Johann Sebastian Bach — Werke für Violine, ed. Günter Haußwald. Neue Bach-Ausgabe, series VI, vol. 1. Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1958, pp. 30–41. IMSLP, no. 497336

Johann Sebastian Bach — Kammermusik, ed. Alfred Dörffel. Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, vol. 27. Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1879, pp. 27–37. IMSLP, no. 01307

Johannes Brahms — Studien für das Pianoforte, no. 5, Chaconne von J. S. Bach für die linke Hand allein bearbeitet. Leipzig, Bartholf Senff, December 1878. Simrock reprint · Sources and critical notes, Henle HN 1187

Ferruccio Busoni — Chaconne für Violine allein, BV B 24, transcription for piano. Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, no. 2334, reprint incorporating the 1916 revisions. IMSLP, no. 03613 · Preface and critical notes, Henle HN 557

Primary Sources

Köthen burial register — Entry for Maria Barbara Bach, 7 July 1720, no. 51. Transcription

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Friedrich Agricola — Nekrolog auf Johann Sebastian Bach, 1754. Online transcription

Johannes Brahms — Letter to Clara Schumann, June 1877. Text discussed and quoted by Eshbach

Secondary Sources

Joel Lester — Bach’s Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance. Oxford University Press, 1999, chapters 1 and 6. Oxford Academic

Joel Lester — J. S. Bach nos enseña a componer: cuatro preludios modelo de El Clave Bien Temperado. Quodlibet 18 (2000), pp. 93–95, examples 2a–b. Universidad de Alcalá

Robert Whitehouse Eshbach — Joseph Joachim and Bach’s Chaconne. Nineteenth-Century Music Review 22/1 (2025), pp. 4–34. Cambridge Core

Carmelo de los Santos — Performance-Practice Issues of the Chaconne from Partita II, BWV 1004, by Johann Sebastian Bach. DMA dissertation, University of Georgia, 2004. Full text

Helga Thoene — Johann Sebastian Bach, Ciaccona – Tanz oder Tombeau? Eine analytische Studie. Oschersleben, Ziethen, 2001. SLUB Dresden

Digital Resources and Recordings

Bach-Archiv Leipzig — Johann Sebastian Bach – Eine Chronologie, entries for 1717 and 1720. Bach-Archiv Leipzig

Netherlands Bach Society — Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor, Shunske Sato, recorded in Haarlem, 24 June 2019. All of Bach

Christoph Poppen and the Hilliard Ensemble — Morimur. ECM New Series 1765, 2001. ECM Records