The Passacaglia musical form is usually of a serious character and is typically based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple metre. The term passacaglia derives from the Spanish pasar (cross, pass) and calle (street). It originated in early 17th-century Spain as a strummed interlude between instrumentally accompanied dances or songs. Despite the form’s Spanish roots (confirmed by references in Spanish literature of the period), the first written examples of passacaglias are found in an Italian source dated 1606. These pieces, as well as others from Italian sources from the beginning of the century, are simple, brief sequences of chords outlining a cadential formula.
The passacaglia was redefined in the late 1620s by Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi, who transformed it into a series of continuous variations over a bass (which itself may be varied). A similar form, the chaconne, was also first developed by Frescobaldi. The two genres are closely related, and since “composers often used the terms chaconne and passacaglia indiscriminately … modern attempts to arrive at a clear distinction are arbitrary and historically unfounded”. The melodic pattern—usually four, six or eight (rarely seven) bars long—repeats without change through the duration of the piece, while the upper lines are varied freely, over the bass pattern serving as a harmonic anchor. The seventeenth-century chaconne, as found in Frescobaldi’s music, more often than not is in a major key, while the passacaglia is usually in a minor key. In eighteenth-century French practice, the passacaglia leans more strongly to the melodic basso ostinato, while the chaconne, “in a reversal of the [seventeenth-century] Italian practice, in various respects undergoes a freer treatment”.
One of the best known examples of the passacaglia in Western classical music is the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach. The French clavecinists, especially Louis Couperin and his nephew François Couperin, used a variant of the form—the passacaille en rondeau—with a recurring episode between the variations. Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s “Passacaglia”, the last piece of the monumental Rosary Sonatas, is one of the earliest known compositions for solo violin.
Nineteenth-century examples include the C-minor passacaglia for organ by Felix Mendelssohn, and the finale of Josef Rheinberger’s Eighth Organ Sonata. Notable passacaglias by Johannes Brahms can be found in the last movement of his Fourth Symphony, which many musicians place among Brahms’ finest compositions. Composed by Brahms to conform to the strict metrics of classical dance, British conductor Constant Lambert called the piece “grimly intellectual” In Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, the bass repeats the same harmonic pattern throughout the piece. The first movement of Hans Huber’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 113 (1899) is a passacaglia.
The passacaglia proved an enduring form throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In mid-century, one writer stated that “despite the inevitable lag in the performance of new music, there are more twentieth-century passacaglias in the active repertory of performers than baroque works in this form”. Three composers especially identified with the passacaglia are Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Paul Hindemith. Especially important examples of the form are found in the output of the Second Viennese School. Anton Webern’s Opus 1 is a Passacaglia for Orchestra, Arnold Schoenberg included a passacaglia movement, “Nacht”, in Pierrot lunaire, and Alban Berg, like Britten, used a passacaglia operatically, in act 1, scene 4 of Wozzeck.
