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Updated: May 25, 2025
Something of Bach's? yes; perhaps the Chaconne. And Brahms? There was the Sonata in A for violin and piano. A stiff piece, but one must not be too popular Heaven forbid that one should catch at cheap applause! How about a trio? What was that thing of Dvorak's, at St James's Hall not long ago? Yes, the trio in B flat piano, violin, and 'cello.
And to-day I would rather run on an office-boy's errand for my country and do it as well as I can, if it's to serve my country, than to play successfully a Bach Chaconne; and I would rather hear a well directed battery of American guns blasting the Road of Peace and Victorious Liberty than the combined applause of ten thousand audiences.
Gaétan Vestris, the first of the family, known as the "Dieu de la Danse," and who held that there were only three great men in Europe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Voltaire, and himself, dared to dictate even to Gluck. "Write me the music of a chaconne, Monsieur Gluek," said the god of dancing. "A chaconne!" said the enraged composer.
He is a composer not only of violin pieces, but of symphonic and choral works, chamber music, songs and piano numbers. His critical analysis of Bach's Chaconne, translated into well-nigh every tongue, is probably the most complete and exhaustive study of "that triumph of genius over matter" written.
In the Bach Chaconne, for instance, some very great violinists do not pay enough attention to making a distinction between principal and secondary notes of a chord. And it can be done, though not without some study. Bach abounds in such pitfalls, and in studying him the closest attention is necessary.
Why couldn't the fellow say what he meant and have done with it, instead of making "powers" rhyme with "ours," and worrying himself to use exactly a hundred and forty syllables? As for music, the amount of time that must have been devoted to petty artificiality in the construction of an affair like Bach's Chaconne is simply staggering.
In the case of certain famous compositions, like the Beethoven concerto, for instance, this is so well established that the artist, and never the composer, is held responsible if it is not well played. But too rigorous an adherence to 'tradition' in playing is also an extreme. I once played privately for Joachim in Berlin: it was the Bach Chaconne.
What do you think of me, an Englanderin, having such a thing? One of your own great men says so, so it must be true." We are studying the Bach Chaconne now. He is showing me a different reading of it, his idea. He is going to play it at the Philarmonie here next week. I wish you could hear him.
"Do you think the Greeks, whose manners we are endeavoring to depict, knew what a chaconne was?" "Did they not?" replied Vestris, astonished at this news, and in a tone of compassion continued, "then they are much to be pitied."
Eighteen sonatas composed by Giovanni Battista Fontana, and published at Venice in 1641, show a distinct advance in style, and Tomasso Antonio Vitali, himself a famous violinist, wrote a "Chaconne" of such merit that it was played by no less a virtuoso than Joachim, at the Monday popular concerts in London, in 1870, nearly two hundred years after its composition.
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