Free Listen to This by Alex Ross

the background. The image of Bach as a bewigged, sour-faced lawgiver of tradition has caused both performers and listeners to neglect the physical dimension of his work. To hear the Ciaccona played on the guitar—there are richly resonant recordings by Andres Segovia and Julian Bream—is to realize that bodily pleasure has its place even in the blackest corners of Bach’s world.
    Bach made his name as an organist, joining a starry lineage of northern European organ players that went back to the Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562—1621). Sweelinck, in turn, drew on the tortuous chromatic techniques of late-Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. In his Fantasia chromatica, Sweelinck subjects a descending chromatic figure and two companion themes to various contrapuntal manipulations, forming a spidery mass of intersecting lines. The finger-twisting brilliance of the writing is held in check by a taut tripartite scheme: in the first third, the theme proceeds at a regular tempo; in the second, it is slowed down; in the third, it goes faster and faster still. Such music marks the beginning of the Bachian art of the fugue.
    The organists of the German Baroque, who included Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel, embraced the practice of “strict ostinato,” in which a short motif repeats in the bass while upper voices move about more freely. (The inescapable Pachelbel Canon is an ostinato exercise in a lulling major key.) The interplay between independent treble and locked-in bass acquires additional drama when the bass lines are bellowed out on the organ’s pedal notes—sixteen- and even thirty-two-foot pipes activated by the feet. Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor, a looser kind of ostinato piece, begins with the bass alone, in a pattern that winds upward from the initial C before spiraling down an octave and a half to a bottom C that should be heard less as a note than as a minor earthquake. Bach was especially attracted to bass lines that crawled along chromatic steps. One of these shows up in the third movement of the playful little suite Capriccio on the Departure of a
Beloved Brother , one of Bach’s earliest extant works. In the 1714 cantata “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen,” a corkscrew chromatic bass portrays the “weeping, wailing, fretting, and quaking” of Christ’s followers.
    When, in 1723, Bach took up the position of cantor at St. Thomas School in Leipzig, he pledged that his music would be “of such a nature as not to make an operatic impression, but rather incite the listeners to devotion.” In employing Italian opera devices such as the lamento bass, he might have been trying to sublimate them, taming a dangerously sultry form. A man of religious convictions, Bach wrote in the margins of his Bible commentary that music was “ordered by God’s spirit through David” and that devotional music showed the “presence of grace.” At the same time, though, his arioso melodies had the potential to undermine the austerity of the Lutheran service; even if he never wrote an opera, he displayed operatic tendencies. He presumably understood these contradictions, and possibly relished them. His comment about the “presence of grace” pertained to a faintly occult description of music-making at the Temple, in the second book of Chronicles: “It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and the singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord … The house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord.”
    The Ciaccona for solo violin, which Bach composed in 1720 as part of his cycle of Sonatas and Partitas, possesses something like that ominous, cloudlike presence. It takes the form of sixty-four variations on a four-bar theme in D minor, with each four-bar segment generally repeated before the next variation begins. But the melodic strands of the opening bars—both treble and bass—disappear for long stretches as Bach explores new material. The