A Flat Fuga in C Major

The second movement of this sonata feels like much ado about little or about something I don't understand. It's six pages long, lasts ten or eleven minutes, and is the second-longest movement of all the sonatas and partitas, shorter only than the ciaccona. But it has no heart! I think it's the ciaccona's alter ego. Like the ciaccona, the fugue is also a repetition of a theme.

Unlike the ciaccona, which runs the gamut of emotions, this fugue hardly has a development, the minor section where everything seems to get complicated. I think that's part of the "problem." Every once in a while, there's a minor phrase, but then it goes back to major again, the music punctuated chords on every downbeat.

I just don't understand how something that seems rather harmless and nice but not meaningful would go on for so long. The ciaccona changes with each repetition of the theme. This is more like a happy dirge.


Overall, this sonata doesn't have much melancholy to it. I just wonder what Bach was thinking when he wrote that fugue. Did he like it? How could he be moved to write something so flat? I've got an idea: blame the king.  Bach was a court composer. Maybe the king said, upon hearing the ciaccona,  "God, can't we have a little something cheerful for a change?" and Bach decided that if he were going to write something just to please the king, he might as well make it ten minutes long.

On the other hand, the first and third movements, the slow ones, are beautiful to me. The first movement of this same sonata is also a repetition of a theme with chords on the downbeats, but it has much more emotional range than the fugue that follows it.

The unaccompanied Bach was long viewed not as real music but as a set of violin studies. I'd believe it with this fugue, which seems to say little using lots of difficult chords. Each chord, each downbeat, is a pitfall for an amateur violinist seeking passage from beginning to end. I will enjoy struggling to play it.   

If any can give the piece soul, it's Hilary Hahn!

Bach comes close as I get to something I don't believe in.

I'm not religious, but I do believe that music means something important even if though I don't know what. I might follow a pied piper off a bridge.

 So I couldn't help thinking of music when I read the work of a philosopher who believed that his ability to imagine something more perfect than anything he'd ever seen proved the existence of a god. When I play the violin, I always have an idea of the way the music should sound, though I can't play it that way. The music exists abstractly, more perfect than anyone can actually play it. This music god, if there is one, shows itself in the major section of the Ciaccona from the D-minor partita.

Bach added the Ciaccona as an extra movement to the D-minor partita after his wife died. It's 64 variations on a four-bar phrase. Can you imagine Bach playing, maybe pacing up and down, saying to myself, "I'm just going to keep playing these same four bars until something happens." Then the major section happens.

It doesn't sound like Bach planned it. It sounds like he just opened the door and there it was, like a beautiful woman to cheer him up when he was grieving. I don't expect a happy section in this piece the way I might expect a sad one in piece written in a major key. And I definitely don't expect a section of beautiful chords that are swelling, as if the violinist can't put enough love into them.

Afterward, the music resumes its minor walk. Vision over. He goes on for another page or two, wistfully at first, sorry for the beautiful part to be over, but then he rebounds in some fast flourishes.
And the last note is an open D string played along with the same note fingered on the opposite string. I love that it's neither a minor chord nor a major chord. Bach left it ambiguous. I like to imagine it's a happy ending.