Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 (Bach) - Cantate Domino

The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord:

Three short passages follow, each reiterating a short motif and doubled at the octave. The section ends with a diminished seventh chord which resolved into the tonic, D minor, through a flourish. The second section of the Toccata is a number of loosely connected figurations and flourishes; the pedal switches to the dominant key, A minor. This section segues into the third and final section of the Toccata, which consists almost entirely of a passage doubled at the sixth and comprising reiterations of the same three-note figure, similar to doubled passages in the first section. After a brief pedal flourish, the piece ends with a D minor chord.

The subject of the four-voice fugue is made up entirely of sixteenth notes, with an implied pedal point set against a brief melodic subject that first falls, then rises. Such violinistic figures are frequently encountered in Baroque music and that of Bach, both as fugue subjects and as material in non-imitative pieces. Unusually, the answer is in the subdominant key, rather than the traditional dominant. Although technically a four-part fugue, most of the time there are only three voices, and some of the interludes are in two, or even one voice (notated as two). Although only simple triadic harmony is employed throughout the fugue, there is an unexpected C minor subject entry, and furthermore, a solo pedal statement of the subject—a unique feature for a Baroque fugue. Immediately after the final subject entry, the fugue resolves to a sustained B♭ major chord.

A multi-sectional coda follows, marked Recitativo. Although only 17 bars long, it progresses through five tempo changes. The last bars are played Molto adagio, and the piece ends with a minor plagal cadence.

The performance time of the piece is usually around nine minutes, but shorter performance times (e.g. 8:15) and execution times of over 10:30 exist. The first section of the piece, the Toccata, takes somewhat less than a third of the total performance time.

As was common practice for German music of the 17th century, the intended registration is not specified, and performers’ choices vary from simple solutions such as organo pleno to exceedingly complex ones, like those described by Harvey Grace.

In the first century of its existence the entire reception history of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor consists of being saved from oblivion by maybe not more than a single manuscript copy. Then it took about a century from its first publication as a little known organ composition by Johann Sebastian Bach to becoming one of the signature pieces of the composer. The composition’s third century took it from Bach’s most often recorded organ piece to a composition with an unclear origin. Despite Mendelssohn’s opinion that it was “at the same time learned and something for the people,” followed by a fairly successful piano transcription in the second half of the 19th century, it was not until the 1900s that it rose above the average notability of an organ piece by Bach. Stokowski’s orchestration, featured in the 1940 Walt Disney film Fantasia, appears to have been instrumental in assuring its status as an evergreen by the 1980s, around which time scholars started to seriously doubt its attribution to Bach.

The composition has been deemed “particularly suited to the organ,” and “strikingly unorganistic.” It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought, and as containing “passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea.” It has been called “entirely a thing of virtuosity” and “not so difficult as it sounds.” It has been described as some sort of program music depicting a storm, and as abstract music, quite the opposite of program music depicting a storm. It has been presented as an emanation of the galant style, yet too dramatic to be anything near that style. Its period of origin has been assumed to have been as early as around 1704, and as late as the 1750s. Its defining characteristics have been associated with extant compositions by Bach (BWV 531, 549a, 578, 911, 914, 922 and several of the solo violin sonatas and partitas), and by others (including Nicolaus Bruhns and Johann Heinrich Buttstett), as well as with untraceable earlier versions for other instruments and/or by other composers. It has been deemed too simplistic for it to have been written down by Bach, and too much a stroke of genius to have been composed by anyone else but Bach.

What remains is “the most famous organ work in existence,” that in its rise to fame was helped by various arrangements, including bombastic piano settings, versions for full symphonic orchestra, and alternative settings for more modest solo instruments.

Bach’s Toccata and Fugue were not performed on the organ exclusively: the title page of the first publication of the piece already indicated that performance on the piano by one or two players was possible. From 1868 to 1881 Carl Tausig’s piano transcription of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor was performed four times in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Many more piano transcriptions of BWV 565 were published, for instance Louis Brassin’s, Ferruccio Busoni’s, and Max Reger’s transcription for piano four hands.

Tausig’s version of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor was recorded on piano rolls several times in the first decades of the 20th century. In the mid-1920s Marie Novello recorded the Tausig piano version of BWV 565 on 78 rpm discs. Percy Grainger’s 1931 recording on the piano, based on the Tausig and Busoni transcriptions, was written out as a score by Leslie Howard, and then recorded by other artists. Ignaz Friedman recorded the piano version he had published in 1944. The 1950s to the first decades of the 21st century saw half a dozen recordings of Tausig’s piano version, and several dozens of Busoni’s.

Before his 1906 Bach biography André Pirro had already written a book on Bach’s organ works. In this book he devoted less than a page to BWV 565: he considers it some kind of program music depicting a tempest, including flashes of lightning and rumbling thunder. Pirro supposes Bach had success with this music in the smaller German courts he visited. All in all he judges the music as superficial, not more than a stepping stone in Bach’s development.

In the early 1920s Harvey Grace published a series of articles on Bach’s organ works. He considers that the notes of the piece are not too difficult to play, but that an organist performing the work is primarily challenged by interpretation. He continues with giving tips on how to perform the work so that it does not reach the ear of the listener as a “meaningless scramble.” He describes the fugue as slender and simple, but only a “very sketchy example of the form.” Grace refers to Pirro in his description of the piece, elaborates Pirro’s “storm” analogy and like Pirro he seems convinced Bach went touring with the piece. His suggestions for the organ registration make comparisons with how the piece would be played by an orchestra.

In 1948 Hermann Keller (de) wrote that the Toccata and Fugue was uncharacteristic for Bach, but nonetheless bore some of his distinguishing marks. His description of the piece echoes earlier storm analogies: Keller saw the opening bars’ unison passages as “descending like a lightning flash, the long roll of thunder of the broken chords of the full organ, and the stormy undulation of the triplets.”

In 1980 Peter Williams writes about BWV 565 in the first volume of his The Organ Music of J.S.Bach. The author warns against numerological overinterpretation like Volker Gwinner’s. Many parts of the composition are described as typical for Bach. Williams sees stylistic matches with Pachelbel, with the north German organ school, with the Italian violin school, but sees as well various unusual features of the composition. Williams questions the authenticity of the piece, based on its various unusual features, and elaborates the idea that the piece may have a violin version ancestor. The reworked edition of this book, in one volume, appears in 2003 and devotes more pages to the authenticity and prior version issues regarding BWV 565: in the meanwhile Williams had written his 1981 article on the authenticity of BWV 565, followed by numerous publications by other scholars about the same.

J. S. Bach as Organist, a 1986 collection of essays edited by George Stauffer and Ernest May, spoke about the registration Bach would have used for BWV 565.

Around the same time as Grace made orchestral version comparisons in his performance suggestions, Edward Elgar was producing his orchestrations of two organ pieces by Bach, however not choosing BWV 565 for this: Elgar did not particularly like that work, nor Schweitzer’s glowing comments about it.

In 1927 Leopold Stokowski recorded his orchestration of BWV 565 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Soon the idea was emulated by other musicians: an orchestration was performed in Carnegie Hall in 1928, Henry Wood (pseudonymously, as “Paul Klenovsky”) realised his orchestration before the end of the decade, by the mid 1930s Leonidas Leonardi had published his orchestration, and Alois Melichar’s orchestration was recorded in 1939.

In 1947 Eugene Ormandy recorded his orchestration of the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The score of Stokowski’s arrangement was published in 1952. Other orchestrations of the piece were provided by Fabien Sevitzky, René Leibowitz (1958), Lucien Cailliet (1967)and Stanisław Skrowaczewski (1968).