The best piece of music ever written. Period.

The Chaconne in D minor, originally for solo violin by J.S. Bach, is a set of variations based around four bars and eight chords: Dm – Gm6c/A7b, Dm/Bflat, Gm/A, Dm. It has been described by some as the best piece of music EVER WRITTEN! One piece of music can’t actually be ‘the best’? Surely it’s not possible? I happen to agree but if you don’t ‘get it’ first time, give it another couple of listens. You should eventually see why it is the most profound and most beautiful. It is a complexity of dissonance, suspension, joy, agony, torture, longing and emotional release. It is said that he wrote the piece after he returned from a trip to find his wife, Maria, dead and already buried, leaving him with seven children.

Johannes Brahms said “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."