POSTER - J. S. Bach Chaconne BWV 1004

Edited by Márta Ábrahám, Barnabás Dukay and Eveline Meier, 2021.

The presentation poster of the Chaconne was designed on the basis of the analysis offered in the book Excerpts from Eternity published by BioBach-Music Publishing.

 The full score of Bach’s most popular violin work is printed on a single page, making it possible to read the entire piece as it hangs on your wall.  The large scroll’s map-like design is aimed to highlight the Chaconne’s internal structure and present it vividly to the eye.  Traditional scores provide hardly any visual cues to allow orientation within the monumental structure of the piece.  The special design of our presentation poster is meant to help overcome this difficulty.  Just as in a full orchestral score, the four-bar lines, rhythmically synchronized, are vertically aligned.  Since the structure of the piece is revealed in this way, the musical processes built upon each other in the 64 variations can be clearly followed.

Becoming directly acquainted with the structural organization of the piece could be illuminating for a new generation of young violinists, and might perhaps lead to a breakthrough or a paradigm shift in interpretation.  We recommend the Chaconne poster as a useful tool not only to all violinists but also to students and teachers of string or keyboard instruments, musicology or composition as well as to all educated music lovers.  It is not only the Chaconne itself that a musician ought to know after all, but also the logic and order of Bach’s variation constructing art.