The passacaglia began as street music strummed between Spanish songs
The word passacaglia comes from Spanish for walking the street. In the early 1600s it was a quick strummed filler between dances. Within decades Frescobaldi turned it into chains of variations over a repeating bass, and the form went on to carry Bach's great organ work, Dido's Lament and the finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony.
A passacaglia is usually serious in mood, written in triple time and built on a bass ostinato, a short melodic pattern of four, six or eight bars that repeats unchanged while the upper voices vary freely above it. The bass acts as a harmonic anchor. The name derives from the Spanish pasar and calle, and Spanish literature of the period confirms the form's origins, yet the earliest surviving written examples come from an Italian source dated 1606, as brief chord sequences outlining a cadence.
In the late 1620s Girolamo Frescobaldi reinvented it as continuous variations over a bass, which could itself be varied, and later composers followed his model. He also shaped the closely related chaconne. Distinguishing the two has frustrated scholars: Percy Goetschius and Clarence Lucas proposed definitions that were exact opposites, and composers often used the terms interchangeably. One rough guide is that Frescobaldi's chaconnes tend toward major keys and his passacaglias toward minor.
The Baroque era produced many landmarks. Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor for organ is perhaps the most famous. The French harpsichordists Louis and François Couperin favoured a version with a recurring refrain between variations, Biber closed his Rosary Sonatas with a solo violin passacaglia, and Purcell's Dido's Lament unfolds over a descending ground. Lute and guitar players embraced the form too, and it appears in operas by Lully.
Rather than fading, it flourished again. Mendelssohn wrote an organ passacaglia, and the final movement of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, which conductor Constant Lambert found grimly intellectual, is often counted among his finest music. Benjamin Britten, Shostakovich and Hindemith returned to it repeatedly in the twentieth century. The Second Viennese School prized it: Webern's Opus 1 is a passacaglia for orchestra, and Berg built a scene of Wozzeck on one. By mid-century, one writer noted, modern passacaglias outnumbered Baroque ones in performers' active repertoire.
Source: Passacaglia
