Florence, 1606. From the press of Cristofano Marescotti comes a little book for anyone who wants to play the Spanish guitar without paying a teacher: Girolamo Montesardo’s Nuova inventione d’intavolatura. It is the first Italian book to print two words destined for a long career. There are twenty-three passacaglias, each headed in the same way, Passacaglie, ò ritornello, and three chaconnes, all in a major key. Neither is yet a piece in the sense we intend. They are chord sequences to strum in triple time, formulas of a few bars that repeat for as long as needed.
They served different purposes. The passacaglia was an interlude, the filler the guitarist played between one verse and the next; the name comes from the Spanish pasar calle, to walk down the street. The chaconne was a sung dance, arrived in Spain at the end of the sixteenth century with the reputation of coming from the Americas, fast, with suggestive movements and mocking verses. One was a player’s refrain, the other a party. They are born far apart and will end up resembling each other so closely that not even their composers will be able to say which was which.
The document that interlaces them dates from 1637. Girolamo Frescobaldi had already included them, each on its own, in the second book of toccatas ten years earlier; now, in Rome, he publishes an addition to his first book of toccatas for harpsichord and organ, and inside it is a piece titled Cento partite sopra passacagli. The musicologist Alexander Silbiger, who devoted the standard study to it in 1996, counts a hundred and thirteen cycles there: the passacaglia slides into the chaconne, the chaconne turns back into a passacaglia, and meanwhile the key changes several times. Frescobaldi had taken two guitar formulas and made of them a game of mirrors for the keyboard.
To play a game you need rules, and Silbiger drew them from the music itself. In Frescobaldi’s pages the passacaglia usually sits in the minor, moves by step, rests its bass on the four-note descent that the seventeenth century used for weeping, and places the dissonances on strong beats, so that every bar seems to lean and then right itself. Each variation counts four groups of three beats. The chaconne usually sits in the major, moves its bass by leaps of a fourth, has fewer dissonances and a cheerier gait, and divides the variation into two large groups, each subdivided into three beats. In 1703 Sébastien de Brossard’s musical dictionary fixed the difference for the French in plain words: in the passacaille the movement is usually slower than in the chaconne, the melody more tender, the expression less lively.
From this we get a way of listening. The first question is the easiest: major or minor, light or half-light. The second concerns the body. The passacaglia is followed by counting slowly one, two, three, four times over, with a slight sway, like someone walking down a street that slopes. The chaconne asks you to tap your foot on two broad beats, each divided in three, and the piece seems to bounce. The third concerns the bass: if it descends by step, one note after another, we are almost certainly in a passacaglia; if it leaps, the chaconne is near. It takes little for the picture to blur. Silbiger observes that shifting a single accent or changing a single interval can create a moment of ambiguity, and that is exactly where Frescobaldi works: in the Cento partite the pleasure lies in realising, a few bars late, that the sway has become a dance.
After Frescobaldi the rules came loose. Bach wrote his Chaconne for solo violin in D minor, on the four-note descent that in Frescobaldi would have been a passacaglia, and his Passacaglia for organ in C minor begins with the bare theme, eight bars entrusted to the organist’s feet alone, before the variations are built on top of it. The theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tried to restore order, and contradicted one another: for Percy Goetschius the chaconne was a succession of harmonies and the passacaglia a ground bass, while Clarence Lucas maintained the exact opposite. Today’s musicology considers sharp distinctions arbitrary. What remains is the criterion of the ear, which works on the Italian seventeenth century and becomes a clue, not a proof, for everything that comes after.
The composers themselves knew it. In 1728 François Couperin published his Pièces de violes in Paris. The first suite, in E minor, opens with a prelude and passes through allemande, courante, sarabande, gavotte and gigue. The last piece bears a title that leaves the choice to the player: Passacaille ou Chaconne.