There was a piece of music that Bach wrote around 1720 which was described by Yehudi Menuhin as ‘the greatest structure for solo violin that exists’. I’d go much further than that. If Goethe was right and architecture is frozen music (what a quote!), this piece is a magical combination of the Taj Mahal, the Louvre and St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the final and longest movement of his second (of six, of course) partita for violin. It is a set of variations (sixty-four of them, I counted) on a theme that drags us through every emotion known to man and a few bonus ones too. In this case, the
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