Sarabande in B minor

In 1720, at Köthen, Bach wrote out a fair copy of six works for violin with no accompaniment at all: three sonatas and three partitas, under the title Sei Solo a Violino senza Basso accompagnato. Unlike the cello suites, this manuscript is in his own hand, and it survives. The first partita, in B minor, BWV 1002, is four dances, and each is followed by a Double, a variation that keeps the dance's harmony and fills it with running notes. The Sarabande is the fifth of its eight movements.

The sarabande reached Spain from the Americas in the sixteenth century as a quick dance with a bad reputation. By the time it settled into the French court suite it had slowed into the gravest dance of the set, in three with its weight on the second beat. You can hear that weight here in bars 2 and 6, which open on a note held through the second beat, and in the way the chords lean into the middle of the bar rather than the start.

Bach wrote nearly all of this movement in chords, three and four notes at a time, which a violinist breaks across the strings with the bow. The melody sits on top of those chords most of the way, and that top voice is what this page carries, with the chords as letters over it. The Double that comes next in the partita takes the same harmony and turns it into an unbroken stream of single notes. It is a separate piece and it is not on this page.

The mandolin is tuned like a violin, so the top voice sits where Bach wrote it, with nothing moved. It runs from the B at the fourth fret of the G course up to one C at the eighth fret of the E course in bar 13, and the rest of it is first position. The notes are quarters and eighths. What is hard is the pace: a mandolin note fades where a bowed one holds, so the held notes of a slow dance need either a tremolo or a player willing to let the silence be part of it.