Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582
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The Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 582) is the name of a piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach for the organ. It is his most large-scale work for the organ, described by the noted organist and Bach player E. Power Biggs as "a work of reasoned and convincing musical logic". It has been dated to the period 1716-1717, when Bach was invited to Dresden for a musical contest.
The opening passacaglia (a kind of ground bass) has an eight-bar bass theme, the first half of which is from an organ mass by the French composer André Raison (the Trio en Passacaille from his Premier livre d'orgue). This theme is then repeated twenty times, during which it is used as the framework for a series of variations, described by Robert Schumann as "intertwined so ingeniously that one can never cease to be amazed".
The ensuing fugue is based on the first half of the same theme, to which Bach adds several counter-melodies; G. Hoffman described it as "reduc[ing] even this passacaglia of passacaglias to the function of an overture".
This re-use of the same melodic material in both the prelude and the following fugue is rare in Bach's work (although another work attributed to him with a similar prelude-fugue thematic connection is the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor).
An arrangement of some initial parts of this Passacaglia is present two times in the Baptism sequence of the movie The Godfather, together with other organ pieces and the ending of the Präludium BWV 532, that concludes the Baptism sequence. A small segment of a piano transcription is also played in the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, performed by Angela Hewitt.
A surprisingly succesful jazz interpretation of this complex piece was recorded by flautist Hubert Laws for his 1973 live CTI Records album Carnegie Hall, featuring keyboardist Bob James and tour-de-force soloing by bassist Ron Carter.
