On the Bach Chaconne, Part 2 (Variations 3 - 10)

(This is part 2 of this series. For part 1, click here)

Variations 3-6

In variation two, the three and four-part texture is thinned to primarily two voices, with the lower one transformed into a descending, chromatic lament. If the topic of this second variation was the dotted rhythm, the rhythmic evenness of variation three directs the listener elsewhere.

Despite the forced prominence of the treble line in Heifetz’s recording, it is only in this third variation that melodic elaboration takes centerstage. Bach writes the first bass line in the first four measures of variation 3, but the variation double and subsequent variations become further abstracted from the ground bass. The subject of this section becomes the single voice and its ornamental inventions.

[Bach Chaconne, first 6 measures of variation 3 (from the Joachim/Moser edition)]

Joachim’s edition shows the importance that tonal expression had for violinists in this time, who equated the singing of melodic subjects with personal subjectivity. Following a crescendo and forte arriving at the top of variation 3, he immediately marks piano ma espressivo, indicating a drastic tonal transformation with the emergence of the upper melodic voice. This melody skips around a bit between the upper voice and the bass line. However, Joachim’s fingerings take great care to keep musical phrases on a single string.

Almost without exception, early and mid 20th-century recordings abide by the principle of maintaining phrases on a single string, most often with constant vibrato and left hand portamento. Joachim explicates this principle in his violin treatise, co-written with Andreas Moser, on the comparison of the singing voice to the violinist’s tone as “the sonorous expression of his inner feelings.” For Joachim, the portamento is a vehicle for this innate, singing tone, which “increases the violinist’s expressive ability, because in most cases it corresponds to the requirement that […] notes of a single musical idea should be heard in the same timbre.” Joachim’s linkage of idea and tone, along with Moser’s equation of singing tone with inner feeling, points to the way in which tone became a highly cultivated marker of subjective interiority.

Given its manifest subjectivity, tone also became a highly contested site for debates around fidelity and authenticity. The 20th-century understanding of performance as a mode of “reproduction” indexed not only the historicization of classical culture (i.e. performance as the reproduction of historical works); it also deliberately brought performance into comparison with the mechanical reproduction of the nascent phonograph technology. Richard Leppert lays out the importance of tone in record companies’ early branding efforts, referencing Victor’s frequent, public “Tone Tests” held between 1915 and 1925, in which “An onstage performer alternated with her own (or even another person’s) recorded performance of the same piece in an effort to prove there was no audible difference between the two.” 

Whether or not Victor’s tone tests were convincing, they tapped into the anxieties of musicians and cultural theorists contending with the effects of mass media on art music. The violinist Carl Flesch, for example, lamented the inauthentic tone turned into a “syrupy mush”—a symptom of “the increasing ‘industrialization’ of musical life” in coffee houses and movie theaters. Another German émigre in America, Theodor Adorno, had more pointed words about the “highly polished style of interpretation” of many players, which in his mind made concessions to the culture industry. Some of Adorno’s notes in his draft monograph on performance, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, identify Heifetz as one such culprit, and unsurprisingly, his critiques gravitate towards matters of tone. Specifically, Adorno takes issue with Heifetz’s “sensual euphony of sound [which] eclipses the realization of the construction.” For the Times’ critic of 1934, Heifetz’s architectural performance transcended tone, but for Adorno, the violinist’s tone only obscured—albeit beautifully—the subcutaneous structures of the work.

Even if one disagrees with Adorno’s conclusions, in listening to Heifetz’s rendition of these variations it is hard not to perceive that the violinist’s sweetness of tone and instinctive stretching of melodic time obscures the regularity of Bach’s phrasing and harmonic rhythm. That is, Bach’s powers of melodic invention are here in contest with Heifetz’s violinistic facility and tonal beauty. As I will elaborate in the next section, this rub between compositional structures and bodily-sonic imperatives is an audible marker of different modes of musical listening and reproduction, drawn along various ideological, nationalistic, subjective, and aesthetic lines.

[skip to 1:16 for variation 3]

Variations 7-10

One of Adorno’s most frequent criticisms was that an essay, a performance, or a composition was not sufficiently “dialectical.” Dialectics—the idea that any progress in thought, expression, or indeed human history, advanced by way of the oscillation and synthesis of antithetical terms—came to characterize German intellectual identity, subjectivity, and culture. There is a direct link between this mode of dialectical struggle and the kind Susan McClary hears in the Chaconne: “to pull oneself out of one’s own skin, to transcend the material conditions of being, to resist the jouissance afforded by repetitious structures so as to follow a progressive trajectory of Bildung.” But what does this struggle actually sound like, and who or what determines the authenticity of its cultural or intellectual progress?

Reading, for a moment, along an Adornian grain, we might glean something from a comparative listening to Heifetz and Adolf Busch in these variations. Heifetz fulfilled the desires of the American culture industry, providing inhuman virtuosity in his absolute consistency of tone, vibrato, and intonation. Busch, by comparison, never hit a mainstream market in the same way, and embodied a European bourgeois sensibility for a mode of music-making that was more private, less virtuosic, and somewhat unpolished (though not by any means imprecise). Given this contrast, it’s not hard to imagine how an Adornian analysis of their playing might have proceeded.

In Heifetz’s recording, variation 7 comes as something of an interruption from the reverie of the previous section. He plays these opening eighth notes with a sharp attack, keeping the entire variation in a strict tempo, significantly faster than the previous variations. This tempo holds through the middle of variation 9, even as the variations are split into divisions of sixteenth and thirty-second notes. He plays Auer’s bowings and fingerings almost exactly, with particularly strong accents as notated in variations 7 and 8:

[Variations 7 and 8 from the Auer edition (G is v. 7 H is v. 8)]

Auer’s edition follows Joachim and David’s in marking the midway point of variation 9 dolce and piano. Heifetz further accentuates this contrast by significantly slowing down the beats approaching the dolce sections, and returning to the earlier mode of playing, with free rubato and an expressive portamento which feels linked more closely to the potentials of romantic violin-playing than to Bach’s consistent phrase structures.

[skip to 2:46 for variation 7]

Heifetz’s changes in tempo are often abrupt, linked to dynamic character contrasts (deciso versus dolce, for example). They exist in a dichotomy between a rigid, accented pulse, and a lyrical, fluid fantasy, in which he lingers on certain notes for their tonal beauty, rather than their structural significance. By contrast, Busch’s tempo choices in these sections sound more anchored in compositional features. For example, variations 7 through the middle of 9 are characterized by the diminution of the opening, eighth-note passage, into running thirty-second notes. Whereas Heifetz plays this all within one tempo (highlighting the accentuated, deciso character marked in various editions), Busch chooses to speed up gradually with the diminution of note values. This creates a dramatic acceleration, in which his fingers sometimes fall behind the bow, creating an effect of improvisatory abandon. Busch’s choices manifest an attention to the horizontal flow between variations, privileging the continuity of phrase structure and overall pacing, rather than abrupt dynamic and character contrasts. One gets the sense of a unified journey, rather than a single personality capable of alternately virtuosic and lyrical feats.

[skip to 3:08 for variation 7]

These corporeal and hermeneutic distinctions have everything to do with cultural history and ideology. Busch’s profile much more resembled Adorno’s—he similarly emigrated from Germany to the United States following the rise of Nazism, eventually settling in Vermont. Unlike Heifetz, Busch never assimilated into the mainstream tastes of the American culture industry, though he had much success as a soloist and chamber musician, founding the Marlboro Music School and Festival with pianist Rudolf Serkin. While he was not as actively involved in the musical avant-garde as Adorno, he was himself a composer, and in many ways kept alive (in the States, nonetheless) Adorno’s ideal of chamber music as a mode of personal, intellectual reflection and interpretation. As such, Busch’s individualism was one marked by personal conviction and reflection, rather than the celebrity and bravura that Adorno found to be indicative of fascist tendencies coalescing in American culture.

Having set up these ideological antitheses, it would be tempting to follow through and draw conclusions about the broad sweep of cultural history from relatively minute differences in interpretations of the Bach Chaconne. A much more interesting exercise, however, would be to put both of these variations, and this specific mode of subjective identification, in a broader context...