Partita for Violin No. 2

Partita for solo violin in D minor, BWV 1004, by Johann Sebastian Bach, composed around 1720. Its five movements end with the expansive Chaconne.

Connect

Allemanda (Partita for Violin No. 2): The opening movement of Bach’s Partita for Violin No. 2, a measured German-style dance in D minor. It establishes the partita’s dance-based design before the faster movements.
Partita: A suite of instrumental movements, often based on stylized dances and shaped by national traditions. Bach’s work belongs to the Baroque suite tradition while giving its final movement exceptional weight.
Johann Sebastian Bach: A German composer and musician of the Baroque era, known for contrapuntal and sacred as well as instrumental works. Bach composed the partita as part of his unaccompanied violin repertoire.
Busoni Chaconne: Ferruccio Busoni’s piano transcription of Bach’s Chaconne from the D-minor partita. It transforms the solo violin movement into a large-scale piano work with added sonority.
Johannes Brahms: A German composer and pianist of the Romantic era whose works include symphonies, chamber music, and piano music. Brahms described the Chaconne as a world of profound ideas expressed with limited means.
Corrente (Partita for Violin No. 2): The second movement of Bach’s Partita for Violin No. 2, a flowing dance in triple meter. Its quick motion contrasts with the opening Allemanda’s measured character.
Baroque dance suite: A sequence of stylized dances that formed a major instrumental genre in the Baroque era. The partita’s four dances draw on the suite’s customary movement types.
Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin: Bach’s collection of three sonatas and three partitas for unaccompanied violin, BWV 1001–1006. The D-minor partita is one of six works in this collection, copied around 1720.
Johannes Brahms’s Chaconne Study: Brahms’s piano study for the left hand, based on Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin. It demonstrates how the movement’s implied harmony can be recast for one piano hand.
Chaconne (Vita della mia vita): A 2001 novel by Helena M. H. Janeczek that connects Bach’s Chaconne with Holocaust memory. The novel uses the movement as a frame for stories of persecution and remembrance.