On the Bach Chaconne, Part 3 (Variations 11-21)

(This is part 3 of this series. For part 1, click here. For part 2, click here)

 Variations 11 -  15

Student: Mr. Heifetz, what do you think of popular music?

Heifetz: Swing, boogie-woogie, or … I can hardly pronounce it, Boo-bop or something like that? [students laugh]

Well, confidentially, I like some of it, very much [students laugh]

This interaction between a college student and Mr. Heifetz takes place in a short film produced by World Artists Incorporated, entitled “Portrait of an Artist.” The film, released in 1953, depicts Heifetz reluctantly but obligingly agreeing to visit a class of music students on an idyllic American university campus. The premise of Heifetz’s visit is that he came to look over some manuscripts in the library—the professor who served as his liaison has, however, assembled his students in the music hall in the hopes of cajoling Heifetz to meet them. When Heifetz agrees, the students are predictably starstruck, bubbling over with questions.

A few things are clear in this short, scripted exchange: that popular music (i.e. African-American music)—and especially the more avant-garde genre of be-bop—was casually denigrated; that it was somehow a subversive gesture for Heifetz to “confidentially” admit he liked some of this music; and that passing judgment in this way was not only funny to the students, but prefaced his own performance of classical music, taken very seriously indeed.

“Portrait of an Artist” paints a propagandistic and reverentially one-dimensional image of Heifetz, in line with other of his appearances in mainstream media, such as his cameo in the film, “They Shall Have Music” (1939). In character with the violinist’s reluctant but heroic appearance at the university, this film features Heifetz as the savior of an impoverished music school, which he dramatically sponsors through a triumphant performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in Carnegie Hall. These Hollywood examples illustrate how European art music was, in the 20th-century American culture industry, associated with social mobility (through the patronage of extraordinary individuals), cultural advancement (through the denigration of the “popular”), and heroic individualism (through the celebrity-making of mass media).

Heifetz’s ambivalence about popular music in “Portrait of an Artist” carried through to his real life, given that he recorded popular standards on the piano, sat in to accompany the jazz violinist Stuff Smith in his 1930s sessions in New York, and recorded compositions inspired by African American and Caribbean music. It Ain’t Necessarily So for Deutsche Grammaphon, for example, includes tracks entitled “From the Canebrake,” “Jamaican Rumba,” and “Píece en forme de habanera,” respectively by Samuel Gardner, Arthur Benjamin, and Maurice Ravel. Both “From the Canebrake” and “Jamaican Rumba” were written by Jewish composers—Samuel Gardner’s parents emigrated from Russia to the States when he was one, and Arthur Benjamin lived his entire life in Australia. Only one piece on the recording, “Levee Dance, Op. 27 No. 2,” was composed by an African American composer, Clarence Cameron White—a violinist, composer, and pedagogue who wrote the opera, Ouanga!, on the life of the onetime slave and first emperor of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Regardless of how one reads Heifetz’s approach to jazz and Afro-Caribbean music (cultural appropriation or opportunism? Progressive foresight? Atavistic withdrawal?), he was clearly interested in the potential crossovers between European art music and African American vernaculars.

These contiguities of African-American music and the Chaconne in America vivify the fluid mélange of musical materials and contexts that was a feature of the 20th century. Despite the line drawn between art music and popular music, Heifetz’s recordings from It Ain’t Necessarily So show the ways in which similar violinistic techniques smoothed over the rough histories of very different musical traditions. For example, the same style of broken-chord playing, heard in Heifetz’s recording of the Chaconne’s opening phrases, embellishes the melody of the Black spiritual, “Go Down, Moses,” in White’s “Levee Dance.” Heifetz’s singing tone and violinistic rubato and portamento carry over transcriptions of popular song and the lyrical passages of the Chaconne.

This superimposition of specific cultural techniques on “foreign” contexts is a feature of the Chaconne’s interpretive history. Variations 11-15 are some of the movement’s most dramatic, consisting of arpeggiated figures whose rapid, perpetual movement and growth culminate in the recapitulation of the piece’s opening phrase. In editions by David, Joachim, and Auer, all three violinists superimpose a range of bow techniques on these arpeggiated variations. All three begin by syncopating the bowing, slurring four notes over the second and first pair of each four-note group of thirty-second notes. In the second variation, both David and Auer create a new arpeggiated texture, which repeats the top and bottom notes of chords. All three editions employ some form of thrown, bouncing bow (saltando)—a technique notably used in the 19th century by composers including Nicolo Paganini and Felix Mendelssohn. These virtuosic additions/editions are indicative of the 19th-century shift away from polyphonic fluency, and towards compositions which showcased the virtuosic possibilities of individual instrumentalists. And at the same time, these ahistorical embellishments contributed to the transcendental reputation of the Chaconne by increasing its sonic impressiveness and aura of unplayability.

In Adornian terms, one might view Heifetz’s efforts to sound (African) American culture as a feature of the nascent “postmodern”—the Stravinsky-esque pole standing against Adorno’s absolutist account of Schoenberg’s modernism. This latter modernism stayed with the authentic tracing of historical (bourgeois European) subjectivity through the linear development of material, rather than engaging the globally-mediated pastiche grab-bag of contemporary life (especially in port cities of the “new world”). However, considering even the relatively immediate context of Bach’s interpretation by Joachim, it’s apparent that later French and Italian bodily techniques were liberally applied to the “foreign” terrain of the 18th-century Chaconne. These layers of corporeal practice make it harder to hold onto the notion of an authentic through line, undisturbed by the movement of people, instruments, musical techniques and genres.

Variation 16

Following the recapitulation and resolution of the Chaconne’s opening phrases, Bach transitions to the second section of the movement, in D major. This is signaled by a double-stop, keeping the lower D of the resolution and adding a third above (F#). This transition bears the full ideological, emotional, and spiritual weight of the Chaconne’s meaning for many violinists, as evinced in Carl Flesch’s poetic description of the moment:

The lovely D major now comes with the effect of a deliverance, like the sun which, dividing the lowering clouds, smiles gently down upon the earth. The type of expression corresponding to this mood is based upon a pp freed from all earthly heaviness, whose production makes peculiar technical demands: an entire suspension of bow pressure, and a tone so far as possible produced on the fingerboard, without vibrato and equalized, as though coming from a distance and dematerialized. The auditor must believe that he hears a dream-spun, immaterial echo.

It’s not hard to discern the religious overtones in Flesch’s language of deliverance, which were certainly explicit in Bach’s own understanding of his musical language. What is interesting about Flesch’s description is that he gives material instructions for the sound of a dynamic “freed from all earthly heaviness”—that is, a wispy, unwavering tone, played without pressure and over the fingerboard of the instrument. Something about this tone signifies or summons one of the immaterial, transcendental effects so closely associated with this piece.

Augustin Hadelich’s recording for Warner Classics (2021) sits somewhere between the 19th/20th-century bravura tradition of interpretation, and a more modern sensibility emphasizing pulse, voice-leading, and articulations in line with 18th-century accounts of performance practice. Here, however, he leans into the ideological grandeur of the moment, taking a long break after the cadence at the end of variation 15, and slowing the tempo down considerably in the opening phrases of the D major section. Given that Hadelich was of a generation of violinists reaching maturity with the global ascent of Youtube as an archival resource, it’s not a stretch to say that his widely synthetic approach—assimilating features of 20th-century performance with a more modern sensibility—is partially an artifact of this readily-accessible database.

This synthesis of styles both confirms and troubles Richard Taruskin’s much-quoted commentary on late 20th-century historically-informed practice. For Taruskin, the period performance movement was in fact a distinctly modern take on historical music: one which could calcify into objectivist accounts of authoritative texts and principles, or, alternatively flourish in a refreshingly live, messy, imaginative, and oral/aural tradition. At its best, this movement was a necessary reset for the unthinking performance traditions of the “mainstream”—a normative categorization that Taruskin falls back on in different terms (“straight” versus “crooked”; “objective” versus “subjective”), in order to make critical value judgments about different approaches to the act of performance.

The violinist Rachel Podger’s interpretation is more visibly rooted in the 18th century: she uses gut strings, a baroque setup, and references treatises by Tartini and Quantz in her masterclasses. Podger’s approach to this pivotal modal transition is less overwrought than Hadelich’s. Beginning in the previous arpeggiated section, she attends to melodic changes throughout the chord, rather than insistently emphasizing the bass notes, as does Hadelich (like Heifetz, and Szigeti, and many other early/mid-20th century artists). Her recapitulation of the opening phrases is not overly dramatic and even lightly ornamented, and she doesn’t lose a beat in the transition from the minor to major section. It’s hard not to hear her choices here as a refusal of the heroic treatment of this return and transition.

Rather than make value judgments about which approach might be more suitably postmodern, I again want to explore these instances for their historical and contemporary adjacencies. Podger’s refusal of mid-20th-century heroism; Hadelich’s study of this bravura tradition; Taruskin’s equivocations about the authoritative versus liberating potentials of period performance practice; or, a little further afield, Heifetz’s 1991 televised performance of the Chaconne alongside a number from Porgy and Bess; his recording of Clarence Cameron White’s “Levee Dance”; or Hadelich’s recording of White’s piece during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police and a global reckoning with race. Not to mention the origins of the chacona in South America, swing, boogie-woogie, the blues, or any number of popular, repetitive musical forms culturally cordoned off from—but not entirely dissimilar to—the chacona and its transatlantic, transhistorical, aurally and corporeally-distributed journeys.

This constellation of contiguous moments and events demonstrates that we do not need to wholly buy into 19th and 20th-century narratives about the Chaconne’s transcendental nature in order to appreciate the significance of this work. If anything, we might better understand the Chaconne by taking into account the cultural meanings it accrues in its spiraling passages and contiguities. There’s no doubt that the moment of the Chaconne’s composition and initial performance practice will continue to define its trajectory. At the same time, by virtue of its continuing performances and encounters, the movement’s identity might become a little less secure. We might acknowledge that it has drifted, like so many cultural objects and practices: an identity which comes not only from its genealogy and its structure, but from what Edouard Glissant points to as a world, a people, or a utopian principle formed by “their constant exchange with others.”

Variations 17-21

The D major section beginning in variation 16 does not stay grounded for long. In variation 17, a rising scale—a kind of hopeful ascension—is traded between the treble and alto voices. Rachel Podger’s recording emphasizes the smoothness and clarity of these moving lines, creating a polyphonic dialogue between the voices carrying melodic material. Her articulations, for example, of the repeated three-note figures in variation 20, are widely varied, ranging from legato to staccato, piano to forte. Following, for a minute, a Taruskin-like hermeneutic, we might contrast these expressive variations with older 20th-century recordings. Editions going back to Ferdinand David’s, and replicated in Auer’s, mark repeated accents on all of these notes; although Joachim’s significantly diverges by waiting until the figure sits in the lowest octave to begin accenting them.

[Variation 20, Auer edition]

Heifetz’s approach to variation 17 differs significantly from Podger’s. Rather than emphasizing evenness and voice-leading, he focuses on expressive shades of harmony, using a lot of rubato and portamento to linger on particular dissonances. His approach to subsequent variations takes Auer’s markings almost verbatim; in variation 18 he plays all the sixteenth notes quite evenly and with a bouncing, staccato stroke. He continues the tradition in the next variation of playing the initial, repeated three-note figures as harmonics on the A string, lengthening the stroke (though not accenting, as Auer marks). And in variation 19, he follows Auer’s subito piano marking, despite the fact that Bach’s writing here grows in texture and range.

Busch’s approach in these variations is striking. Most notably, starting with the continuous sixteenth notes in variation 18, he plays these notes quite short, but with a discernibly swinging rhythm. It’s somewhat of a mystery how to read this swing: a kind of Ländler artifact of folky, expressively uneven bowing? A waltzing, swinging dance figure superimposed on the chacona? A nod to the French baroque tradition of notes inégales? Busch’s own take on jazz swing?