Bach's violin on Busoni's piano
The findings from the various reworkings and from Busoni's recording on piano roll are combined here in a new edition.
Busoni's piano arrangement of Bach's Chaconne for solo violin is probably one of the most famous and most frequently performed transcriptions of all. In the post-war period and in the course of the shift towards baroque performance practice, people tended to turn up their noses at such "stylistically alien" transcriptions, but Busoni's version is once again very popular, especially with younger pianists.
The legendary piano titan Eugène d'Albert, of all people, to whom Busoni dedicated this work, was not particularly impressed and wrote to him that a work for solo violin was not suitable for a transcription for piano two hands: "In my opinion, the only solution is to be found in Brahms' arrangement for the left hand alone." Busoni himself even considered a version for large orchestra, but realized "that the Chaconne is not sufficient for a large apparatus - it loses its size - for Clavier it still sounds the most homogeneous." Punctuation? Basically, one does not hear the sound of a violin in this piano version, but rather the splendor of an organ.
His Chaconne Busoni reworked it several times and also recorded it on a piano roll. The G. Henle publishing house has now brought together all the resulting insights in an exemplary new edition, together with congenial fingerings by the Canadian virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin.
A little additional tip: the last eight bars probably sound most convincing in Busoni's recorded version: completely without arpeggios, with simple but full-sounding chords.
Ferruccio Busoni, Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, arrangement for piano, edited by Norbert Müllemann, HN 557, € 12.00, G. Henle, Munich 2014
