The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a composition for organ from the Baroque period which was long attributed to the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, but whose authorship has been questioned by a minority of scholars since 1981. It is one of the most widely recognisable works in the organ repertoire. It was written between 1704 and the 1750s. The piece opens with a toccata section followed by a fugue that ends in a coda, and is typical of the north German organ school of the Baroque era.
Little was known about its early existence until the piece was discovered in an undated manuscript produced by Johannes Ringk. It was first published in 1833 during the early Bach Revival period through the efforts of composer Felix Mendelssohn, who also performed the piece in 1840. In the 20th century, its popularity rose above that of other organ compositions by Bach, as exemplified by its inclusion in Walt Disney's 1940 animated film Fantasia using Leopold Stokowski's orchestral transcription from 1927.
The piece has been subject to a wide, and often conflicting, variety of analyses. It is often described as a type of program music depicting a storm, while its depiction in Fantasia is suggestive of non-representational or absolute music.
The English musicologist Peter Williams questioned its authorship in 1981. The musicologist Christoph Wolff, the world's foremost living Bach scholar, believes that the piece is by Bach.
History The only extant near-contemporary source for BWV 565 is an undated copy by Johannes Ringk.Zehnder 2011 (score), "Commentary" pp. 4–5 According to the description provided by the Berlin State Library, where the manuscript is kept, and similar bibliographic descriptions, e.g. in the RISM catalogue, Ringk created his copy between 1740 and 1760.Ringk (score). As far as is known, Ringk produced his first copy of a Bach score in 1730 when he was 12. According to Dietrich Kilian, who edited BWV 565 for the New Bach Edition, Ringk made his copy of the Toccata and Fugue between 1730 and 1740. In his critical commentary for Breitkopf & Härtel's 21st-century revised edition of the score, Jean-Claude Zehnder narrows the time of origin of the manuscript down to around the middle of the first half of the 1730s, based on an analysis of the evolution of Ringk's handwriting. At the time Ringk was a student of Bach's former student Johann Peter Kellner at Gräfenroda, and probably faithfully copied what his teacher put before him. There are some errors in the score such as note values not adding up to fill a measure correctly. Such defects show a carelessness deemed typical of Kellner, who left over 60 copies of works by Bach.
The title page of Ringk's manuscript writes the title of the work in Italian as Toccata con Fuga, names J. S. Bach, and indicates its tonality as "ex. d. #.", which is usually seen as the key signature being D minor. However, in Ringk's manuscript the staves have no symbol at the key (which would later become the standard way to write down a piece in D minor). Most modern score editions of BWV 565 use the D minor key signature, unlike Ringk's manuscript.Kilian 1964 (score), p. vi Another piece listed as Bach's was also known as Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which received the "Dorian" nickname, that qualifier being effectively used to distinguish it from BWV 565.
Ringk's manuscript does not use a separate staff for the pedal part, which was common in the 18th century (notes to be played on the pedal were indicated by "p." being written at the start of the sequence). Printed editions of the BWV 565 organ score invariably write the pedal line on a separate staff. In Ringk's manuscript the upper staff is written down using the soprano clef (as was common in the time when the manuscript originated), where printed editions use the treble clef.
All other extant manuscript copies of the score date from at least several decades later: some of these, written in the 19th century, are related with each other in that they have similar solutions to the defects in the Ringk manuscript. Whether these derive from an earlier manuscript independent from Ringk's (possibly in the C. P. E. Bach/Johann Friedrich Agricola/Johann Kirnberger circle) is debated by scholars. These near-identical 19th-century copies, the version Felix Mendelssohn knew, use the treble clef and a separate staff for the pedal. In general, the later copies show a less extensive use of fermatas in the opening measures and have fewer measures that do not add up properly, but that may as well be from polishing a defective source as from deriving from a cleaner earlier source. In the later copies the work is named for instance "Adagio" and "Fuga" (for the respective parts of the work), or "Toccata" for the work as a whole.
The name "Toccata" is most probably a later addition, similar to the title of Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, BWV 564, because in the Baroque era such organ pieces would most commonly be called simply Prelude (Praeludium, etc.) or Prelude and Fugue.Williams 1981, p. 331 Ringk's copy abounds in Italian tempo markings, fermatas (a characteristic feature of Ringk's copies) and staccato dots, all very unusual features for pre-1740 German music.
German organ schools are distinguished into north German (e.g. Dieterich Buxtehude) and south German (e.g. Johann Pachelbel). The composition has stylistic characteristics from both schools: the stylus phantasticus,Krummacher, Friedhelm. "Bach's Free Organ Works and the 'stylus Phantasticus, pp. 157–171, in and other north German characteristics are most apparent.Spitta 1873, Vol. I pp. 402–403Spitta 1899, Vol. I pp. 403–404 However, the numerous recitative stretches are rarely found in the works of northern composers and may have been inspired by Johann Heinrich Buttstett, a pupil of Pachelbel, whose few surviving free works, particularly his Prelude and Capriccio in D minor, exhibit similar features. A passage in the fugue of BWV 565 is an exact copy of a phrase in one of Johann Pachelbel's D minor fantasias, and the first half of the subject is based on this Pachelbel passage as well. At the time it was however common practice to create fugues on other composers' themes.Newman 1995, 181.
Structure BWV 565 exhibits a typical simplified north German structure with a short, free opening (toccata), a longer fugal section (fugue), and a short free closing section which is not officially named by notation.
Toccata The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave and ornamented with a lower mordent. 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 suspended chord which eventually resolves.
Fugue 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.Yearsley 2012, p. 93 Immediately after the final subject entry, the fugue resolves to a sustained B major chord.
Coda 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.
Performance The performance time of the piece is usually around nine minutes, but shorter performance times (e.g., 8:15Alain 1982 (recording) or 7:59Chapuis 1967 (recording)) and execution times of over 10:30Schweitzer 1951 (recording) exist. The first section of the piece, the Toccata, takes somewhat less than a third of the total performance time.Biggs 1960 (recording)Walcha 1963 (recording)
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.Grace 1922, pp. 60–65
Reception 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.Zehnder 2011 (score), Introduction, p. 20 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",Stinson 2006, pp. 18–19 followed by a fairly successful piano transcription in the second half of the 19th century,Joseph Moog – Scarlatti Illuminated at it was not until the 20th century that it rose above the average notability of an organ piece by Bach.Rollin Smith. Stokowski and the Organ. Pendragon Press, 2004 pp. 161 ff. The work's appearance (in an orchestral transcription by Leopold Stokowski) in the 1940 Walt Disney film Fantasia contributed to its popularity, around which time scholars started to seriously doubt its attribution to Bach.Williams 1981
The composition has been deemed both "particularly suited to the organ" and "strikingly unorganistic".Liner notes of Fagius 1988 (recording) It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought, but also as containing "passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea". It has been called "entirely a thing of virtuosity"Pirro 1902, p. 35 yet also described as being "not so difficult as it sounds". It has been described as some sort of program music depicting a storm, and, contrarily, as abstract music.Theodore Gracyk (2013). On Music, pp. 39–40. Routledge. 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),Marshall, Robert Lewis (2003). "Johann Sebastian Bach" pp. 61 ff. in Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Music, edited by Robert Lewis Marshall. Psychology Press. Spitta 1899, Vol. I pp. 434–435 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 but Bach.Keller 1948, pp. 64 ff.