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 20th century that it rose above the average notability of an organ piece by Bach. 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. The composition has been deemed both "particularly suited to the organ" It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought, yet also described as being "not so difficult as it sounds". It has been presented as an emanation of the
galant style, yet too dramatic to be anything near that style. 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. 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.
Score editions In 1833, BWV 565 was published for the first time, in the third of three bundles of "little-known" organ compositions by Bach. The edition was conceived and partly prepared by
Felix Mendelssohn, who already had BWV 565 in his repertoire by 1830. In 1846,
C. F. Peters published the
Toccata con Fuga as No. 4 in their fourth volume of organ compositions by Bach. In 1867, the
Bach Gesellschaft included it in Band 15 of its complete edition of Bach's works.
Novello published the work in 1886 as No. 1 in their sixth volume of Bach's organ works. In the early 1910s,
Albert Schweitzer collaborated with
Charles-Marie Widor to compile a complete edition of Bach's organ compositions, published by
Schirmer. In 1912, BWV 565 was published in the second volume, containing works of Bach's "first master period". Around the start of the
First World War,
Augener republished
William Thomas Best's late 19th-century edition of the work in volume 2 of their complete edition of Bach's organ works. After 1950, when the
Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis was published, it was no longer needed to indicate the Toccata and Fugue in D minor as "Peters Vol. IV, No. 4", as "
BGA Volume XV p. 267", as "Novello VI, 1", or without "Dorian", to distinguish it from the Toccata and Fugue with the same key signature. From then on the work has been simply BWV 565, and the other, the so-called "Dorian", has been
BWV 538. In 1964, the
New Bach Edition included BWV 565 in Series IV, Volume 6, with its critical commentary published in Volume 5 in 1979.
Dietrich Kilian, the editor of these volumes, explains in the introduction to Vol. 6 that the New Bach Edition prefers to stay close to authoritative early sources for their score presentations. For BWV 565 that means staying close to the Ringk manuscript. Consequently, the name of the piece was again given in Italian as
Toccata con Fuga, and the piece was again written down in D Dorian (i.e. without at the key). However, more modern conventions were maintained with regard to using the treble clef in the upper staff and using a separate staff for the pedal. In 2010,
Breitkopf & Härtel initiated a new edition of Bach's organ works, with BWV 565 appearing in its fourth volume.
Franz Liszt adopted the piece into his organ repertoire. He used the
glockenspiel stop for the
Prestissimo triplets in the opening section, and the quintadena stop for the repeated notes in bars 12–15. The work was first recorded (in abridged form as "Toccata and Finale") by
John J. McClellan on the
Salt Lake Tabernacle organ in
Salt Lake City in late August or early September 1910 by the
Columbia Graphophone Company, who released it in the US in 1911 on Columbia 10-inch disc A945 and in the UK on Columbia-Rena disc 1704, which is one of the first commercial pipe organ recordings. In 1926, the organ version of BWV 565 was recorded on 78 rpm discs. In a 1928 concert program, Schweitzer indicated BWV 565 as one of Bach's "best-known" compositions, considering it to be a youth work. Schweitzer's first recording of the piece was issued in 1935. In 1951, he recorded the work again. In that, and subsequent releases of Walcha's recordings of BWV 565 on
Deutsche Grammophon (DG), there is an obvious evolution of the work from "one among many" organ compositions by Bach to a definite signature piece by the composer. In early
Archiv Produktion releases, the list on the sleeve contained the organ compositions in the order they appeared on the recording without distinction; by the 1980s, the font size for BWV 565 was larger than that of the other compositions; and in the 1990s, Walcha's 1963 recording of the piece became the only piece by Bach included in DG's
Classic Mania CD set with popular tunes by various classical composers. US record companies seemed faster in putting BWV 565 forward as Bach's best-known organ piece. In 1955,
E. Power Biggs recorded the Toccata 14 times, played on different European organs, and Columbia issued those recordings on a single album.
Hans-Joachim Schulze describes the force of the piece on a record sleeve:Here is elemental and unbounded power, in impatiently ascending and descending runs and rolling masses of chords, that only with difficulty abates sufficiently to give place to the logic and balance of the fugue. With the reprise of the initial Toccata, the dramatic idea reaches its culmination amidst flying scales and with an ending of great sonority. Organists recording BWV 565 more than once include
Jean Guillou,
Lionel Rogg and
Wolfgang Rübsam. Some musicians, such as
Karl Richter, who did not record organ performances very often, included BWV 565 in their anthologies. By the end of the century, hundreds of organists had recorded BWV 565. In the 21st century, several recordings of BWV 565 became available online, such as a recording included in
James Kibbie's Bach Organ Works project and John Scott Whiteley's broadcast for BBC TV made in 2001.
Piano arrangements recording No. 676 (part 1):
Marie Novello's performance of
Tausig's arrangement of BWV 565. The VF series with a bright green label ran from 1925 to 1927. Bach's Toccata and Fugue was 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. Many more piano transcriptions of BWV 565 were published, for instance by
Louis Brassin,
Ferruccio Busoni,
Alfred Cortot, and by
Max Reger in transcriptions for both piano two hands and four hands. Tausig's version of the work 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. From the 1950s to the first decades of the 21st century, there were half a dozen recordings of Tausig's piano version, and several dozen of Busoni's.
In Bach's biographies In
Johann Nikolaus Forkel's early 19th-century
biography of Bach, the work is left unmentioned. Forkel probably did not even know of the composition. In C. L. Hilgenfeldt's
biography it is merely listed among the published works. Hilgenfeldt considers the
Toccata and Fugue in F major the most accomplished of Bach's toccatas for organ. In
Karl Hermann Bitter's 1865 Bach biography, BWV 565 is only listed in an appendix. In 1873,
Philipp Spitta devoted somewhat less than a page to the work in the first volume of
his Bach biography. He assumed the work was written in the first year of Bach's second
Weimar period (1708–1717). He saw more north German characteristics (Buxtehude's restless style) in the form of the Toccata, rather than south German (Pachelbel's simple and quiet approach). Spitta considered the fugue "particularly suited to the organ, and more especially effective in the pedal part." His description of the piece refers to long sections that are surfeit: "rocking passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea" and organ recitatives alternating with "ponderous, roaring masses of chords". Spitta likened some phrases of the Toccata and Fugue to another early work, the
Fugue in G minor, BWV 578. In
Reginald Lane Poole's 1882 biography, the work is again merely listed. In the 1905 first version of his Bach biography, Albert Schweitzer leaves BWV 565 unmentioned in the chapter on the organ works. In
André Pirro's 1906 biography, Bach's organ toccatas are only mentioned as a group. He considers none of them written before Bach's later Weimar years (so closer to 1717 than to 1708). Up to this point, none of the biographers seem to have given any special attention to BWV 565. If mentioned, it is listed or described along with other organ compositions, but is far from being considered the best or the most famous of Bach's organ compositions, or even of his toccatas. However, that was about to change. In 1908, Schweitzer reworked his biography for its first German edition. In that edition he indicates the work as "well known". After listing several organ works in which Bach showed himself a pupil of Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, and various contemporary Italian composers, Schweitzer describes the Toccata and Fugue in D minor as a work in which the composer rises to independent mastery: In
Hubert Parry's 1909 Bach biography, the work is qualified as "well known" and "one of the most effective of [Bach's] works in every way". He calls the Toccata "brilliantly rhapsodical", more or less follows Spitta in the description of the fugue, and is most impressed by the coda: "It would be hard to find a concluding passage more imposing or more absolutely adapted to the requirements of the instrument than this coda." Apart from seeing Buxtehude's influence, he likens the theme of the fugue to the theme of the fugue of
Prelude and Fugue in B minor, BWV 544, which he considers a late work. In the 1979 first volume of his Bach biography,
Alberto Basso calls BWV 565 "famosissimo" (most famous) and "celebratissima" (most celebrated), maintaining that the popularity of these works hinges entirely on this composition. He sees it as a youth work, composed before 1708, that with its underdeveloped fugue is stylistically eclectic but unified without breaking continuity. He links it to the northern school, and mentions Tausig, Busoni and Stokowki as influencing its trajectory. Basso warns against seeing too much in the composition. He feels it may be within reach of everyone but is neither an incantation, nor ridden with symbolism and even less a sum of whatever. In his 1999 Bach biography, devotes a few pages to the Toccata and Fugue. He considers it an early work, probably composed for testing the technical qualities of a new organ. He feels that the crescendo that develops through arpeggios, gradually building up to the use of hundreds of pipes at the same time, can show exactly at what point the wind system of the organ might become inadequate. In his view, some of the more unusual characteristics of the piece can be explained as resulting from Bach's capacity as an organ tester.
Christoph Wolff, in his 2000 Bach biography, sees BWV 565 as an early work. In his view, it is "as refreshingly imaginative, varied, and ebullient as it is structurally undisciplined and unmastered".
In books on Bach's organ works Before his 1906 Bach biography, André Pirro had already written a book on Bach's organ works. In that book he devoted less than a page to BWV 565, and 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 gives tips on how to perform the work so that it does not sound like a "meaningless scramble". He describes the fugue as slender and simple, but only a "very sketchy example of the form". In his description of the piece, Grace refers to Pirro, elaborating 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. His description of the piece echoes earlier storm analogies. Keller sees 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". The reworked edition of this book, in one volume, appeared in 2003, and devotes more pages to discussing the authenticity and possible prior versions of BWV 565. In the meantime, Williams had written a 1981 article on the authenticity of BWV 565; this was followed by numerous publications by other scholars on the same topic.
J. S. Bach as Organist, a 1986 collection of essays edited by George Stauffer and Ernest May, discussed the registration Bach would have used for BWV 565.
Arrangements for symphony orchestra Around the same time as Grace made comparisons with an orchestral version in his performance suggestions,
Edward Elgar was producing orchestrations of two organ pieces by Bach, which did not include BWV 565. Elgar did not particularly like the work, nor Schweitzer's glowing comments about it. In 1927,
Leopold Stokowski recorded his orchestration of BWV 565 with the
Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1947,
Eugene Ormandy recorded his orchestration of the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The score of Stokowski's arrangement was published in 1952.
René Leibowitz (1958),
Lucien Cailliet (1967),
Stanisław Skrowaczewski (1968) and
Andrew Davis (2023–2024).
In film BWV 565 was used as film music well before the sound film era, becoming a
cliché to illustrate
horror and
villainy. Its first uses in sound film included the 1931 film
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the 1934 film
The Black Cat. After 1936, another approach to using BWV 565 in film was under consideration.
Oskar Fischinger had previously used Bach's
Third Brandenburg Concerto to accompany abstract animations and suggested to Stokowski that his orchestral version of BWV 565 could be used in the same way. Later in 1937, while in
California, Stokowski and
Disney discussed the idea of making a short animated film of ''
The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Dukas for Disney Studios, the intention being to introduce classical music to a younger and broader audience. Similar in spirit to the popular series of Silly Symphonies,'' the short film proved costly to produce. However, starting with the Toccata and Fugue and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Stokowski, Disney and the music critic
Deems Taylor chose other compositions to incorporate into their film project, known as "The Concert Feature". By the time Disney's
Fantasia was released in 1940, the animations accompanying BWV 565 had been made semi-abstract, although Fischinger's original idea that the performance of the music start with showing Stokowski directing his orchestra was preserved. Taylor begins his narrative with, "What you’re going to see is the designs and pictures and stories of what music inspired in the minds and imaginations of a group of artists." The opening number, the "Toccata and Fugue," will be
absolute music—music that exists for its own sake—and will try to depict what might go on in the mind of the person listening to it. "At first you are more or less conscious of the orchestra," Taylor explains, "so our picture opens with a series of impressions of the conductor and the players. Then the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination—oh, just masses of color, or cloud forms, or vague shadows, or geometrical objects floating in space." In the 1942 cinema release of the film by RKO, the Toccata and Fugue was cut entirely, only to return in a 1946 re-release.
Fantasia contributed significantly to the popularity of the Toccata and Fugue. The 1950 film
Sunset Boulevard used BWV 565 as a joking reference to the horror genre. The 1962 film adaptation of
The Phantom of the Opera used BWV 565 in the suspense and horror sense. Shortened to two minutes in length, BWV 565 was used as the introductory theme for the French animation
Once Upon a Time... Man, in 26 episodes between 1978 and 1981.
Ennio Morricone took inspiration from the score BWV 565/1 for the 1965 film
For a Few Dollars More of
Sergio Leone. Morricone used the
trumpet musical theme
"La resa dei conti" ("Sixty Seconds to What?") for the opening baroque
mordent of J. S. Bach's Toccata. The cowboy shootout with
Gian Maria Volonté takes place in a
deconsecrated church, turned into a
pigsty, where the theme is heard on the organ at full blast. According to , "It is [...] hard to establish what led the composer to quote Bach—perhaps the shared key of D minor led to the idea of the organ, whereas the small church might have at most accommodated nothing more than a run-down harmonium. In any case, for a classically trained musician such a glaring reference to one of the most hackneyed commonplaces of Western art music—certainly the most hackneyed within Bach's output (although its authorship has long been disputed)—clashes with the alleged intention of paying homage to the Eisenach maestro." In his autobiographical book written with , Morricone wrote that, "The death ritual carried out in a church convinced me to use the Bach quotation and the organ. Volonté's gestures in that sequence reminded me of some paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer that Leone was fond of. Those artists lived in an epoch close to Bach, and with my music I decided to look at that kind of past."
Authenticity research and reconstructions A certain uneasiness regarding the authorship of BWV 565 had been around long before the 1980s. From Hilgenfeldt in 1850, to Elgar in the 1920s, to Basso in the late 1970s, the extraordinary popularity of the piece seems to have taken scholars and musicians by surprise. Mendelssohn felt it was something for both the erudite and the masses. Some scholars who analysed the composition's counterpoint felt it was substandard. They said it was stylistically too close to the
galant style of the later 18th century to be an early 18th-century composition. was seen as too limited to give a conclusive answer to these questions. What was available from that branch of the research could be explained in opposite ways. Likewise, whether the more elaborate stylistic evidence was considered conclusive or merely circumstantial, depended on who was trying to prove what. Despite many stylistic similarities, however, Kellner was ruled out a quarter of a century later: "in comparison with the style of Kellner, BWV 565 more resembles the style of J. S. Bach"; "many of Kellner's keyboard pieces revealed that his style boasts pronounced
galant elements ... this clearly stands in strong contrast to the dramatic style of the Toccata BWV 565". by the second decade of the 21st century, statistical analysis left the attribution issue undecided. No-one had found a composer more compatible with the style of its fugue than Bach himself. nor does the work's entry on the website of the
Bach Archiv Leipzig mention any doubts.
Attribution question In 1961, Antony Davies remarked that the Toccata was void of counterpoint. and
Friedrich Blume saw problems with the traditional historiography of Bach's youth. Roger Bullivant thought the fugue too simple for Bach and saw characteristics that were incompatible with his style: Several essays in
John Butt's
Cambridge Companion on Bach discuss the attribution problems of BWV 565. Other biographers and scholars have left these attribution and prior-version theories unmentioned, Williams suggested that the piece may have been created by another composer who must have been born in the beginning of the 18th century, since details of style (such as triadic harmony, spread chords, and the use of solo pedal) may indicate post-1730, or even post-1750 idioms. Statistical analysis conducted by Peter van Kranenburg in 2006 confirmed the fugue was atypical for Bach,
Richard Douglas Jones takes no position with regard to the composition's authenticity. In 2009, Reinmar Emans wrote that Claus and Wolff had diametrically opposed views on the reliability of Ringk as a copyist, inspired by their respective positions in the authenticity debate, and thinks that sort of speculation unhelpful. The other hypothesis elaborated by Williams is that BWV 565 may have been a transcription of a lost solo violin piece. Parallel octaves and the preponderance of thirds and sixths may be explained by a transcriber's attempt to fill in harmony which, if preserved as is, would be inadequately thin on a pipe organ. This is corroborated by the fact that the subject of the fugue, and certain passages (such as bars 12–15), are evidently inspired by string music. Bach is known to have transcribed solo violin works for organ at least twice: the first movement of the
Partita in E major for solo violin, BWV 1006, was converted by Bach into the solo organ part of the opening movement of the cantata
Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir, BWV 29. Bach also transcribed the Fugue movement of Sonata in G minor for solo violin,
BWV 1001, as the second half of Prelude and Fugue in D minor for organ,
BWV 539. This notion inspired a new theory of adaptation: the reconstruction. Reconstructions have been applied to several other works by Bach, with variable success. A reconstruction for violin has been played by
Jaap Schröder and
Simon Standage. The violinist
Andrew Manze produced his own reconstruction, also in A minor, which he has performed and recorded. In 2000, Mark Argent proposed a
scordatura five-stringed cello instead. In 2005, Eric Lewin Altschuler wrote that if the first version of BWV 565 was written for a stringed instrument the most likely candidate would have been a
lute. Yet another violin version was created by Chad Kelly and performed by
Rachel Podger on her 2022 album
Tutta Sola. In 1997, Bernhard Billeter proposed a
harpsichord toccata original, which was deemed unlikely by Williams. However, Billeter's argument makes authorship by Bach more likely: Bach's
harpsichord toccatas (most of them early works) have simplistic elements and quirks similar to BWV 565. Bach's early keyboard works, especially the free ones like Preludes and Toccatas, cannot always be clearly separated into organ pieces and harpsichord pieces. Spitta had already remarked on the similarity between a passage in BWV 565 and one in the harpsichord Prelude BWV 921; Robert Marshall compares the continuation patterns and sequences of the harpsichord Toccata
BWV 911, and the Fugue theme of the harpsichord Toccata
BWV 914, with the same of BWV 565. ==References==