“If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”
Johannes Brahms, in a letter to his beloved Clara Schumann in 1877, refers to Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous Chaconne, the last movement of his Second Violin Partita in D Minor.
Often referred to as the most difficult piece of classical music to master, it is played here (in a BBC radio concert) with phenomenal grace by Itshak Perlman at St. Johns Smith Square in London, 1978.