Polyphony, the sound of simultaneous melodies, is already an ambitious compositional undertaking given the limitations of a single violin. It is realized in two basic ways: by placing the burden upon the performer to bow and finger two or more strings at once, or by placing the burden upon the composer to choose notes in a particular way. In this latter case, the composer must guide the listener to hear linear connections between non-consecutive notes of a single melody, causing the emergence of a new melody. But Bach was not content with even mere polyphony. In Sei Solo he created higher-level linear connections between non-consecutive movements, and even between non-consecutive works, through the device of alternating between two different types of works, the sonata and the partita.

      In the context of Sei Solo,and comparable music of the Baroque period, the sonata is a four-movement work consisting of the following: a slow introduction or Prelude; a Fugue-a faster movement that, in varying degrees, simulates or actually achieves the effect of several simultaneous musical lines imitating one another; a Slow Movement; and a fast, brilliant Finale. Because the three Sonatas contained in Sei Solo adhere so faithfully to this model, they are structurally analogous to one another, and within each sequence of analogous elements, the successive differences add up to a narrative thread that can be traced through the whole cycle. As a result there are many such threads simultaneously, and the fact that the Sonatas are separated from one another by the three intervening Partitas intensifies the non-linear quality of the connections, existing as they do between portions of music that do not directly follow upon one another in time. Substituting the generic movement titles-Prelude, Fugue, Slow Movement, Finale-for the ones printed in the program (which are faithfully reproduced from the manuscript) is an aid to tracing the narrative threads.

      The Partitas are not structurally analogous to one another as the Sonatas are, except in the general sense that they are all suites of dances. They therefore comprise not so much a counterpoint of multiple threads, but more of a single arch. At the climax of this arch is the Ciaccona, the final movement of Partita no. 2, in many ways the heart of the entire cycle.

      In the summer of 1720 Bach accompanied his patron Prince Leopold on a three-month trip to Karlsbad. He returned to his home in Cöthen to discover that his wife of thirteen years, Maria Barbara, had taken ill and died while he was away. It has been suggested, by Professor Helga Thoene of the University of Düsseldorf, that Bach composed the Ciaccona as a musical epitaph for Maria Barbara. Professor Thoene has found, embedded in the Ciaccona, several chorale melodies associated with texts on the subject of death, such as Christ lag in Todesbanden. At this time Bach would also have composed the three Partitas in which the Ciaccona is housed, pairing them one to each of the Sonatas, which were probably composed some years earlier. Also at this time he would have chosen the ordering of the six works, with its alternating structure, and copied them out in a new fair copy.

      The question of how to refer, collectively, to these six works for unaccompanied violin has always been an unacknowledged stylistic sore point, and the awkwardness may cover up something of deep significance, integral to the character of the music. Most published editions resort to the confusing and cagey misnomer, "Six Sonatas and Partitas" (What does this mean? Twelve works all together, six of each kind? Six works, each of which is both a sonata and a partita?). Some do a little better with "Three Sonatas and Three Partitas," which achieves limited descriptive accuracy at the cost of elegance, but creates the impression that two different sets of works are being presented together for no apparent reason, and does not do justice to the intertwining of the two. The title on the manuscript "Sei Solo" has the elegance and sense of unity that the published versions lack, but it is coy with regard to content and presents a translation problem. The obvious translation, Six Solos, assumes that Bach was surprisingly sloppy with his Italian and neglected to pluralize "solo" to "soli." But there is another translation, You Are Alone, which assumes that he was masterful enough with Italian to make an intentional pun on the word "sei" which can mean either "six" or "you are."

      The mere existence of such a choice is rich with possibility. A literary rather than a generic title implies a sense of unity for the cycle that is supported by the obviously careful ordering of the six works. The literary title then undergoes yet a further bifurcation of meaning: it may refer to the tragedy of the composer suddenly finding himself alone; or it may refer to the circumstance of the performer, who is not only all alone on an instrument that is more often heard in combination with others, but is also undertaking rich polyphonic textures that are a strain on the lonely instrument's capabilities, both from the performer's and the composer's points of view. Finally, if we zoom back outward again to view both branches of the pun, we find that it carries an overarching significance by rendering unanswerable the question "One or Many?" If the title is Six Solos it is a collection of individual works; if You Are Alone then it is a single work subsumed under that title, and one wouldn't dream of altering the order of the solos in a complete performance any more than one would change the order of the movements in a symphony.

      So how should we refer to this body of music? The solution preferred here is to leave the title Sei Solo untranslated in hopes of establishing a tradition similar to the one for Così fan tutte which, unlike some other Mozart operas, is almost never referred to in an English title by anglophones for various stylistic reasons. The case for leaving Sei Solo untranslated is even stronger since its ambiguity is available only in its original language.

      Professor Thoene has also found internal musical evidence relating the three Sonatas to the three high feasts of the Christian liturgical year: the first Sonata in G minor with Christmas, the second in A minor with Easter and the third in C major with Pentecost. She writes: "The [first] two sonatas in the minor mode probably relate to Christ's earthly existence-his incarnation, passion and resurrection-while the third, in the major mode, points to Heaven, to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit." The keys of the companion Partitas adhere to the same minor-minor-major pattern.

      Of primary interest here is the heavenward trajectory, culminating in the C major Sonata, and it is hardly necessary to seek out encrypted chorale texts to feel a coherent emotional progression in this cycle. The first Sonata, in its Prelude and Fugue, avoids the upward motion to the major tonality of the mediant-the very motion that, in the works following, provides a sense of aspiration, hope, recollection of things lost and-sometimes-hair-tearing supplication. Instead, these opening movements proceed directly to the minor key a fifth above the starting point before descending to the murky depths of heavily flatted tonalities where tempting adventures, as well as threatening demons, seem to lie in wait. All of the first three works (G minor Sonata, B minor Partita, A minor Sonata) end with movements that straddle the line between angry defiance and defiant rambunctiousness, leading up to the fourth work (the D minor Partita) whose final movement is the Ciaccona.

      The old Spanish dance form of which this movement is a transformation used the device of an endlessly repeated bass line to incite crowds of people to uninhibited revelry-it was the type of aesthetic experience that Friedrich Nietzsche would later formulate as the Dionysian one-temporarily freeing them of worldly concerns and even of their sense of rootedness in space and time. The contradiction of employing such a device in a work whose subject matter is that very most tangible of temporal demarcations may partly account for the quality that the Ciaccona has of transcending all human experience.

      Both literature and life are filled with stories of individuals undergoing unimaginable trials and emerging weirdly transformed. In 2001: A Space Odyssey Dr. David Bowman, passing through a space-time portal, is subjected to impossible degrees of acceleration and is subsequently transformed into an immortal entity. Adrian Leverkühn, the composer-hero of Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, undergoes his own metamorphosis following an encounter with the devil, and it is tempting to imagine a similarly superhuman gauntlet being passed through by Beethoven, leading up to the emergence of his late style, or by Wagner leading up to the Ring Cycle. The Prelude to the C major Sonata is what we find on the other side, having passed through the gauntlet of the Ciaccona and the two will be linked, in this evening's performance, by a minute of silence. It is quite natural that when we encounter heaven it should turn out to be weird, for how could an earthbound human find it familiar? The C major Prelude, with its hypnotically pulsating rhythm, takes us through a series of surprising harmonic transitions comparable to the surreal visual effects accompanying Bowman's journey in the film. The Fugue, the longest that Bach ever wrote, conveys in its heavenly length a sense of eternity and of healing, while the Sonata's Finale, Allegro assai, brings the Dionysian experience into the celestial realm.

      After this there is nowhere to go but back down to familiar earth! The E major Partita has a decidedly joyful yet earthly quality to contrast with the C major Sonata. This is emphasized by Bach's choice of French dance forms and titles in that Partita, which he had scrupulously avoided in the earlier two, even going so far as to designate the seventh movement of the B minor Partita Tempo di Borea rather than simply Bourée. By the early Eighteenth Century, Italian dance forms had become somewhat abstracted from actual dancing. Meredith Little, in her book Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach, describes the Italian corrente, for example, as "a virtuoso piece for violin or keyboard soloist." Indeed, fully half of the B minor Partita is not dance music at all since the doubles for each of the dances have their own independent meter and tempo markings, removing them yet one degree further from their dance origins. This abstraction from mundane courtly ritual seems appropriate in the portion of the cycle that is ultimately bound heavenward. In contrast to this, the French dance forms of the E major Partita would have been associated, in Bach's mind, with the actual courtly dancing that was at the time being embraced by the German aristocracy, and to which he was exposed as a student. By alluding to this he closes the cycle with an expression of life-affirming preference for the tangible earth.

      Thus Sei Solo carries the listener through a process of human transformation whose nexus is the transition from the Ciaccona to the C major Prelude, allowing the listener the privilege to know what it is like to be a Beethoven or a Wagner, a Leverkühn or a Bowman. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience William James identifies such privileged states of knowledge as a key aspect of the mystical experience. The one who has gained such knowledge may find herself or himself helpless to articulate it to others, except in a special medium such as music. Of his own limited experience with these states James writes: "It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity." Others have commented, in a similar vein, on the cognitive dissonance that must attend a mystical state, owing to the necessary fact that one is coming into direct, tangible contact with something transcendent. The manner in which I have described the  Ciaccona resonates nicely with James' quotation of J. A. Symonds' testimony on such a state: "It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self." But there are other musical devices, besides the repeated bass lines of the Ciaccona, that Bach uses to induce such states and two of these will be discussed here.

      Chromatic scales, the kind obtained by playing directly adjacent white and black keys on the piano, contain the paradox that although their steps are physically close they are harmonically distant. Professor Thoene points out that, historically, they have symbolized the affect of sorrow and are associated with grief, death and sin. In Sei Solo they first create this sorrowful affect in the Corrente of the B minor partita. They are not heard again until the Fugue of the A minor Sonata, where they accompany the episodic extensions that follow statements of the Fugue subject. Here it occasionally happens that adjacent notes of the chromatic scale are harmonized in such a way that the motion between the roots of consecutive chords is upward by five steps. This is the so-called plagal cadence that often accompanies the word amen in a hymn. Because the natural flow of musical cadences is in the opposite direction (descending five steps), plagal cadences have a way of inducing a direct experience of eternity by reversing the normal flow of time. Thus the affect of sorrow is transformed by a tangible sense of eternity. The transformation is only hinted at in the A minor Fugue, and it is absent from the Ciaccona where prominent chromatic lines next occur, but it reaches its full force in the C major Fugue, where it occurs for the first time in a major key, and is used to harmonize the Fugue subject itself.

      Pedal points are instances in which a single pitch, often the lowest pitch of a given passage, is sustained-or sustained in implication by being sounded repeatedly-while harmonies change above or around it, often rendering it dissonant. They are a powerful representation of the counterpoint inherent in the universe, of the seeming contradiction of simultaneous stasis and change. When a pedal point occurs on the tonic-scale degree one-it creates a sense of direct contact with eternity, somewhat like the nirvana or satori states of Buddhist philosophies. When it occurs on the dominant-scale degree five-it creates an intense feeling of anticipation and inevitability. One can almost trace the narrative of the cycle by abstracting its pedal points. The G minor Fugue owes its taut structure in part to its two pedal points, both of which are on the note D. The first is a tonic pedal in the temporary key area of D minor while the second is a dominant pedal heralding the return to G minor. The A minor Fugue is not nearly as controlled as the G minor. It wanders into the key of D minor and seems in serious danger of accidentally ending there (is it the gravitational pull of the Ciaccona?) but is rescued at the last moment by a dominant pedal on E that bursts on the scene like a deus ex machina. The Ciaccona has extended dominant pedals in both the second and third panels of its triptych format of which the one in the middle panel, in a major key and imitating the trumpets and drums of a celestial orchestra, is of particular note. The pedal points reach their greatest structural significance in the C major Fugue, of which more below. The E major Preludio, with its two tonic pedals,provides the last glimpse of eternity before the cycle returns joyously to Earth.

      The monumental C major Fugue contains four separate fugal expositions: the last is a literal reprise of the first; the second features stretto, where one statement of the fugue subject commences before the previous one has finished; and the third presents the subject in inversion, where the shape of the melody is preserved but with the rises and falls reversed. The four expositions are connected by three extended passages of single-line writing called episodes. The second and third of these episodes culminate in nearly identical passages consisting of two voices interweaving statements of the subject over a dominant pedal. In the first case, the dominant pedal is on the note D, leading the music away from its home key of C major while, in the second case the dominant pedal is on the note G, leading the music back to C major for the reprise of the first exposition. 

      To conclude this discussion of Sei Solo it must be mentioned that at least one of the aforementioned pedal points emerges through implication long in advance of when it actually begins to be sounded. In the remarkable final episode of the C major Sonata, the single line rises to thin, dizzying heights, from which vantage point the odd lack of a bottom to the sound makes the listener that much more aware of an implied low G of which the actual notes being played are mere overtones. The pitch range of the violin comprises only the top half of the full range of orchestral or keyboard music, but when the violinist touches a high G it is as though a mountain peak is being reflected in a lake, allowing the violin's ability to reach great heights to serve as a stand-in for an ability to reach great depths. It is in this, and in many other ways that Sei Solo achieves enormous power precisely by virtue of the limitations of its medium. The necessity of relying upon the imagination of the listener creates a much more powerful effect than could ever be realized in sound.