There is a legend that Johann Sebastian Bach’s sublime Chaconne, in his “Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin”, was composed as a memorial to his first wife, Maria Barbara, who unexpectedly passed while Bach was away on a two-month work trip. It is based mostly on apocryphal evidence, and bolstered by certain musicological analyses pointing to salient themes/motifs common to that style of music; but really the main appeal of this theory is that it makes sense, to our contemporary sensibilities, that a work of such staggeringly intense emotive power could only come from a place of commensurate emotional intensity in the artist responsible for its creation.

Of course, there’s no solid reason to believe that this really was the case. Bach, in particular, actually seemed to be among the more quotidian of the canonical Western composers, as much of what has been passed down to posterity regarding his personal life consists of rather workaday details typical of any diligent craftsman, extraordinarily prolific though he was: Concerns over employment, instrumentation, the skills (or lack thereof) of the musicians available to him, etc. Much of this also arrives to us secondhand, from the reports of his colleagues and progeny—whoever Bach was to himself, in his own words, we have very little idea of.

But after Bach came Romanticism, and the notion of a composer producing a tour de force out of the welter of his deep mourning simply strikes the modern art lover as perfectly natural; and doubly so if such a work bears the sort of solemn profundity that the last movement of the Second Partita does. Beethoven, after all, had his Immortal Beloved—why shouldn’t his Baroque predecessor have something like that, too? Never mind that the man seemed to whip up masterpieces at the drop of a hat—his duties as Thomaskantor at Leipzig obligated him to compose a new cantata every week—or that the great artists end up creating their major works out of a wide range of inspirations and emotional contexts. His wife died, and he was not there to witness her death. Hence: Chaconne. […]