A passacaglia is a Baroque dance that is a lot like the chaconne. One of Bach’s greatest hits is his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Like the Chaconne, the Passacaglia is a long series of variations on a short, simple dance form. Also like the Chaconne, it’s pretty awesome.
Bach got the first half of the theme from André Raison’s Trio en Passacaile from Premier livre d’orgue. He took it a lot further out, though.
Before we go any deeper into the music, let’s talk about this instrument. Each pipe in a pipe organ plays a single note with a particular timbre. There are multiple pipes for each note, each of which produces a different blend of overtones. The knobs all around the keyboards on the organ are called stops, and they activate and deactivate different banks of pipes to produce different timbres. A big organ will have multiple keyboards, one of which is a set of foot pedals, and each keyboard controls its own array of banks of pipes. Furthermore, each keyboard can have different stop settings, effectively making each one a separate instrument. If you think about it, that makes a pipe organ the mechanical equivalent of a modular analog synthesizer.
Bach’s keyboard music probably wasn’t written for any specific keyboard instrument. People usually play the Passacaglia and Fugue on the organ, but you could play it on pedal harpsichord too.
Bach certainly didn’t have a pipe organ in his house, so he probably did his rehearsing on something like this.
Here’s a lovely arrangement of the Passacaglia for viols, Baroque cousins of violins and cellos that have frets like a guitar. The collective sound has an accordion-like quality.
Speaking of guitar, Robert Fripp has a pretty good arrangement for acoustic guitar quintet.
Here’s a long jazz improv on the Passacaglia’s form and chord changes by jazz flutist Hubert Laws.
Like I said, the passacaglia is a dance form. Here’s how the dance looks. It seems fun in that formal European aristocratic way.
The passacaglia was a widely used compositional form in early modern Europe. “Dido’s Lament” by Henry Purcell is a passacaglia.
Here’s another lovely passacaglia by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber:
You can think of Bach’s Passacaglia as being like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane playing the blues: it’s a simple folkloric framework used as a basis for a series of complex elaborations and abstractions. Here’s my Ableton Live visualization of the piece.
The Passacaglia begins with an eight-bar theme, followed by twenty variations on that theme, each of which is also eight bars long. Then there’s the fugue, a more free-form exploration of the theme’s first half. Below, I talk through the whole piece one section at a time. The links point to timestamps in the video. My discussion draws on this analysis by David Mulbury.
Just the bassline, played on the pedals. It starts in a weird place metrically, on the third beat of the first bar. What is it with Bach’s Baroque dances that they never start on the downbeat?
Some quiet chords enter on top of the theme. They are very syncopated. It’s quite difficult for me to feel the rhythms here if I don’t have a visual bars-and-beats reference.
The rhythms here are the same as in variation 1, but the melody descends the entire time. It’s so sad! There’s a crunchy little moment in measure 18 where the counterpoint spells out an Eb7 chord. This includes D-flat, which is a very dark note in C minor. We will be hearing more of this note later.
The rhythm straightens out to become a continual stream of quarter and eighth notes.
A new rhythmic figure appears: da-da-daaah, da-da-daaah (two sixteenths and an eighth.)
For the first time, the pedals play something other than the theme, the rhythmic figure from variation 4, with spaces between each statement. The left hand empties out to make room for it.
The theme is back in the pedals. A new melodic motif appears, three quick sixteenth notes followed by a long note, spelling out ascending scales, until the end when the scales start descending.
The motif from variation 6 continues, but now it’s upside down so it’s almost all descending. Symmetry!
E Power Biggs uses a duck-call-like sound in the pedals. There are lots of complicated rising and falling scales in sixteenth notes. In measure 67, we briedly visit F minor. There’s a brief moment in the first beat where the right hand is playing a D-flat a minor ninth above a C, which is a hair-raising dissonance. In measure 71, there’s a Db chord, previewing the very dramatic one toward the end of the fugue.
The theme exits from the pedals again. Instead, the pedals do a call and response with the left hand, trading off another new melodic motif, three sixteenth notes jumping up and down a third followed by a long note. In measures 75-76, there’s a brief visit to the key of A-flat major.
The midpoint of the passacaglia. Mulbury says that variations 10 and 11 are in double counterpoint at the fifteenth and are thus mutually invertible. The pedal and the left hand are lined up now, playing simple quarter notes, while the right hand continues to do complicated sixteenth-note scale runs.
Surprise! The theme jumps from the lowest voice to the highest one. The pedals don’t play anything. The complicated scale pattern that was in the right hand is now in the left hand.
The theme stays on top. A little sequence that goes up a step and down a third runs across both hands and the pedals. There’s a brief trip to F minor in measures 99-100.
An abstracted version of the theme continues in the right hand, but it’s not on top anymore. The pedals drop out, and the texture reduces to three voices. The harmony gets more complicated, with visits to A-flat major, F minor and E-flat major. In measure 113, Bach outlines Ebaug/C as a substitute for G7, which is extremely hip.
The texture thins out to two voices. The left hand plays rising arpeggios that hand off to alternately rising and falling arpeggios in the right hand. The pedals continue not to play anything.
The texture thins out even more, so now it’s just a monophonic line playing rising arpeggios, though these are split across both hands in a nifty way.
The texture suddenly fills back out. The theme is back in the pedals, where it will stay for the rest of the variations. There are cool pairs of syncopated chords in the last beat of each measure. If you put some swing on them it would sound like Duke Ellington.
Triplets! This is a bit much for me, frankly.
Bach calls back to the rhythmic pattern from variation 5, in nice big full chords. In measure 148, there is an absolutely wild chord, an entire G7 with A-flat in the bass. In measure 150 there’s a G/Eb. In measure 153 the tonic Cm has a strongly accented F on top of it that makes it sound unmistakably like Cm11. I know, there was no such thing as m11 chords in the 18th century. But whatever you want to call it, that’s what Bach wrote.
A lovely repeated enclosure figure trades back and forth between the hands: upper and lower neighbors in sixteenth notes leading up to long chord tones on each beat. The harmony gets simpler and less crunchy so as not to distract you from all this new melodic interest.
The upper and lower neighbor motif continues, but instead of alternating between the hands, it plays constantly in both hands simultaneously. It’s intense!
The fugue subject is the first half of the theme. The typical way to start a fugue would be to have this subject play by itself, but instead, Bach jumps straight into counterpoint. Mulbury thinks it’s because it would have been redundant to reintroduce the theme after hearing it so many times in the Passacaglia. The eighth-note countersubject that plays under the subject recurs throughout the fugue. Five measures in, there’s another countersubject, this one in sixteenth notes, which also pops up repeatedly throughout the fugue.
Bach departs from traditional fugue writing in another way: Mulbury points out that he doesn’t put the subject through the usual manipulations (inversion, augmentation, diminution, stretto). He treats it more like “a cantus firmus surrounded by a web of counterpoint, rather than as a true, participating fugal subject.”
There’s some more fun crunchy harmony in the fugue. In measure 109 (measure 279 in my video), there’s a G7 with E-flat in the bass. In the next measure there’s an F7 with D in the bass. In measure 116 (measure 286 in my video), there’s the famous Db chord with a fermata. He probably meant for the performer to improvise a cadenza at that point. Bach uses this same idea at the end of the D-major Prelude (BWV 532) and the G-minor Fugue ( BWV 535).
As with all of Bach’s dance-based music, the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor is easier to understand with a beat underneath:
Both the passacaglia and the chaconne are slow triple-meter dances over repeated descending basslines that came to Europe via Spanish conquistadors in the Americas (where they probably learned it from African slaves.) So what is the difference between them? There’s a lot of confusion on this point. I asked my musicologist friends on Twitter and got this helpful response.
passacaglias used to revolve around a certain set of pitches as a figure (A,G,F,E) & had different extramusical/dramatic significance than the chaconne, something that gets lost when the two become primarily non-representational. Britten uses this 4-note fig in his passacaglia
— dr. worldwide™️ (@imanimosley) May 27, 2021
Susan Mcclary explains further:
Musicologists used to love to write articles that attempted to draw a decisive line between ‘chaconne’ and ‘passacaglia’: graduate exams back in the early 1970s still typically demanded that students produce a rule of thumb for distinguishing the two. The fact is, however, that seventeenth-century musicians cared much less about generic boundaries than do historians, and they sometimes used the two terms interchangeably. Yet the music of the time often treats the two in very different ways; if there exists a gray area of overlap in which one can substitute for the other, there are also contexts in which the carefree ciaccona/chaconne has nothing to do with its melancholy twin, the lamenting passacaglia. And even the gray area of overlap can present difficulties: not of the sort pursued by musicologists who want each to have its own separate box, but for anyone concerned with musical meanings.
To some extent, this passacaille functions identically to the chaconne
from Amadis: both serve to induce that state that eradicates inside and
outside, that pulls theatrical characters and spectators alike into that timeless zone of infinite pleasure. Yet the minor key of the passacaille, its rather more yearning melodic shapes, and its dramatic context make it available for a somewhat different reading: one that resonates with entrapment by a surfeit of sensual pleasure, one that may even connect back to the non-European origins of such musical procedures..
The Afrodiasporic roots of the chaconne and passacaglia had been filtered through several European cultures over a couple of centuries by the time Bach got his hands on them, and there is not much dance left in them. But the harmonically static loop-based groove structure persists. I said above that this music reminds me of jazz. I don’t mean that it swings, or that it’s based on the blues. Bach was famous in his lifetime as an improviser, and that probably informed his composing, but his improvisation wouldn’t have sounded much like jazz either. The connection to jazz is at the formal level, in the idea of “art” musicians using short, repeated folk and pop song forms with predictable harmony and meter as the basis for endless variation and elaboration.
I like Bach’s dance-based music better than the symphonies that come later, because the constraint of the form brings out all of his creativity and ingenuity. It can be interesting to hear Beethoven or Brahms chase an idea through multiple key centers and meters and structures, but those large-scale works don’t have the same laser-beam intensity of focus that Bach brings to bear on an eight-bar dance form.