Advanced Cellists, Baroque, Free Sheet Music
First published on May 11, 2024 by Seb
Last updated on May 16, 2024 by Seb
Bach’s Chaconne from Partita No. 2 BWV 1004 for Solo Violin is so great, it is simply known as “The Chaconne”. This is a virtuoso piece even for a professional violinist. Playing it on the cello at its original key of D minor becomes an even greater challenge, not to mention the disuse of the C string.
Some brave cellist instead rearrange this great music to be played in a cello’s natural range, transposed down a fifth to G minor. This is the same spirit that our project “Bach Wrote What?!” embraces. Instead of boxing Bach’s music in, we should expand it as we see fit, to best render it for this moment.
Here is Gabriel Martins performing his arrangement of The Chaconne, now in G minor. It’s an extremely difficult piece, and clocks in at 16 minutes. Gabriel has his cello tuned at the Baroque A=415Hz (a half step down).
Gabriel makes his arrangements available to all on his website. He also composes original music for the cello, such as the the cello solo, Songs of Solitude. You will find free sheet music on his website for that as well. Here is the sheet music for the above Chaconne arrangement.
The good folks at Cellofun.eu have transcribed, transposed, and annotated the entire Bach Solo Violin Partita Nº 2 in D Minor BWV 1004, for the cello. Go to their website for detailed analysis and discussions on this process and the resulting music. Here are the three editions of The Chaconne, now in G minor, for the cello.
The first is a faithful transposition, retaining all Bach’s original annotations for the violin. This is to be used only as a starting reference.
The second is an edited version to best fit this piece to the cello. The underlying philosophy of this type of arrangement is explained here. The good folks have adopted their own extra notations for explaining how to play a piece with the cello. See this page for unusual annotations you find below, including dotted slurs, solid brackets, dotted brackets, x noteheads. The page also explains how you can print these A4 sheets on American letter-size paper.
Here is a clean, notes-only version.
If you want to further revise the Cellfun.eu sheets, you can find .XML files for the entire BWV 1004 arrangement on IMSLP. Here you will find the above PDF again, and a separate XML pack as a ZIP file which contains XML files that you can import into MuseScore and the like.
Here is Rafael Hoekman performing a similar arrangement.
Here is Colin Carr explaining “Why on Earth would a cellist want to get up and play the Bach Chaconne?”, before playing it in G minor.