Angela Hewitt Bach Odyssey VIII (May 11, 2019) 92nd Street Y Notes by Harry Haskell JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) Toccatas, BWV 910-916 Toccata in F-sharp Minor, BWV 910 Toccata in C Minor, BWV 911 Toccata in D Major, BWV 912 Toccata in D Minor, BWV 913 Toccata in C Minor, BWV 914 Toccata in G Minor, BWV 915 Toccata in G Major, BWV 916 Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 903 Johann Sebastian Bach Born in Eisenach, March 21, 1685; died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750 Toccatas, BWV 910-916 Composed between about 1705 and 1714; 1 hour 20 minutes To Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most famous of Johann Sebastian’s musical sons, his father was “the most prodigious organist and keyboard player that there has ever been.” By the time of his death in 1750, the elder Bach’s towering stature as a virtuoso was universally acknowledged. Yet his only formal instruction on keyboard instruments came from his older brother Johann Christoph, who served as organist in the small central German town of Ohrdruf. Young Johann Sebastian proved a quick study, and by age eighteen he was established in his first professional post at Arnstadt. Thereafter his reputation grew by leaps and bounds. So, it would appear, did his self-assurance. In 1717 he traveled to Dresden and challenged the renowned virtuoso Louis Marchand to a contest, which the Frenchman famously forfeited by skipping town. Thirty years later, on a visit to the court of the music-loving Frederick the Great in Potsdam, the aging composer improvised a dazzling set of fugal variations on a theme supplied by the king, which he later used as the basis of his Musical Offering. By all accounts, Bach possessed the ability to transmute his musical thoughts into sound almost at will. Indeed, many of his toccatas, preludes, fantasies, and other freeform works are essentially written-down improvisations. As a young man he made several pilgrimages to Hamburg to hear Johann Adam Reincken play; years later, after listening to Bach extemporize on the organ, the celebrated Dutch organist was moved to declare, “I thought that this art was dead, but I see that in you it still lives.” Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach’s first biographer, reported that he followed up his improvisation on King Frederick’s “royal theme” with an even more impressive tour de force. Frederick, “probably to see how far such art could be carried, expressed a wish to hear also a fugue with six obbligato parts. But as not every subject is fit for such full harmony,
Bach chose one himself and immediately executed it to the astonishment of all present in the same magnificent and learned manner as he had done that of the king.” Dating from early in Bach’s career, the seven toccatas on today’s program chart his progress from an ambitious journeyman church organist in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen to a high-ranking court musician inWeimar. By the time he reached his mid-twenties, Bach had little left to learn as a performer and was free to concentrate on refining his technique and expanding his compositional range. A musical magpie, he gathered material and inspiration wherever he found it, combining the “learned” and heavily contrapuntal German idiom with the melodious, extraverted Italian style and the French penchant for florid, speech-like arioso. So voracious was his appetite for new forms and techniques that he once walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck—a distance of some 250 miles —to sit for more than three months at the feet of the elderly Dieterich Buxtehude, the most eminent church musician in northern Germany and, like Reincken, a significant figure in the development of the keyboard toccata. The Toccatas Derived from the Italian verb meaning “to touch,” a toccata is a virtuosic instrumental piece in a quick tempo designed to show off the player’s agility and lightness of touch. The genre originated in sixteenth-century Italy as a vehicle for improvisational display. In the early 1600s Girolamo Frescobaldi, the organist of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, published two seminal volumes of toccatas, some of which, remarkably enough, were designed to accompany the celebration of the Mass. From Italy the toccata spread throughout Europe, taking root in Germany largely through the efforts of Frescobaldi’s pupil Johann Jakob Froberger. Characterized by sharp contrasts and often daring harmonies, the free-form toccata was associated with the “fantastic style,”or stylus phantasticus, which a contemporary scholar described as “the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing, neither to words, nor to a harmonic subject. It is organized with regard to manifest invention, the hidden reason of harmony, and an ingenious, skilled connection of harmonic phrases and fugues.” In the hands of Buxtehude and Reincken, the toccata eventually developed into a large-scale form in which elaborate fantasy-like passages alternated with strict fugues, exercising both fingers and brain. It’s not hard to imagine why such a combination appealed to an up-and-coming virtuoso like Bach, who was both an ace improviser and a brilliant contrapuntist. His first essays in the genre did not go unappreciated. In fact, four of Bach’s seven harpsichord toccatas—numbers 910, 911, 912, and 916 in the Bach Werke Verzeichnis, the official catalogue of his works--were included in manuscript collections that his brother Johann Christoph compiled between about 1704 and 1713, presumably for teaching purposes. Other contemporary and near-contemporary authorities viewed these early works less favorably. Forkel, for one, all but dismissed the toccatas out of hand in the landmark biography he published in 1802. At the end of a laudatory survey of Bach’s “outstanding” keyboard works, he offered a tepid addendum: “A great number of single suites, toccatas, and fugues which have been preserved besides the above have all much artistic merit in one way or another; but belong, nevertheless, among his youthful attempts. At the most, 10 or 12 single pieces out of this number are worth preservation . . . .”
Fortunately for posterity, such glib judgments have not stood the test of time, and we can now hear the harpsichord toccatas as early manifestations of Bach’s precocious contrapuntal genius, not simply harbingers of his mature organ toccatas. (In fact, some scholars believe that BWV 910-916 were intended to be played on either organ or harpsichord.) These seven pieces are clearly the work of a prodigiously gifted musician who is stretching his legs, experimenting with new forms and techniques, and showing the world what he’s capable of, even as he pays homage to his illustrious predecessors. In the F-sharp-Minor Toccata, for example, the opening rhapsodic flourish morphs into a steady stream of cascading sixteenth notes, which in turn flows into a pool of searching, slow-moving harmonies. This placid interlude gives way to the first of two fugues, both built on descending scales, one in duple, the other in triple meter. Bach’s figurations are equally diverse, ranging from full-bodied chordal textures to airy arpeggios in the socalled “broken style, or style brisé, associated with lute music. The melodic line is embellished with turns, trills, apoggiaturas, and other ornaments that reflect the French and Italian influence on Bach’s music. A similarly exuberant, bravura spirit permeates the other six toccatas. (Despite their family resemblance, it’s unclear whether Bach conceived BWV 910-916 as a set, as with much of his later keyboard music.) The works’ internal cohesiveness is all the more remarkable in light of evidence suggesting that some of them were composed piecemeal, with individual sections written separately and stitched together later. Although all seven toccatas are comprised of the same basic ingredients, Bach ingeniously varies the mix so that no two are alike and no idea outstays its welcome. The Toccata in G Major, the last of the group in order of composition, stands out by virtue of having three clearly defined movements: two bright, energetic allegros wrapped around a somber, meditative essay in E minor. Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 903 Composed before 1723; 12 minutes Bach wrote this perennially popular masterpiece sometime before his move to Leipzig in 1723. His biographer Christoph Wolff dates the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue to the final years of his tenure in Weimar and suggests that Bach premiered it in Dresden in 1717, on a recital celebrating his default “victory” over the absent Louis Marchand. If so, BWV 903 may have been one of the pieces Johann Mattheson had in mind that year when he referred to Bach for the first time in print as “the famous organist of Weimar” whose works “are certainly such as must make one esteem the man highly.” On the other hand, another Bach expert, Martin Geck, places the D-Minor Fantasy and Fugue as late as 1720 and speculates that its dolorous chromaticism was an expression of the composer’s grief over the death of his first wife, Maria Barbara. Whatever “meaning” the notes may convey, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue definitely exemplifies the improvisatory prowess that Forkel associated with Bach’s “unpremeditated fantasies.” The music modulates freely, unpredictably, and often daringly, illustrating Forkel’s observation that Bach “linked the remotest keys together as easily and naturally as the nearest; it was almost as if he were modulating in the inner circle of a single key.” The work’s opening section wends from one tonal center and scalar pattern to another by way of a dazzling variety of figurations and passagework.
The Fantasy abounds in unexpected twists and turns; at times it sounds as if Bach himself is not quite sure where his fancy is leading us. The theme of the companion Fugue is a rising chromatic melody that returns throughout the piece, ingeniously embedded at different levels in the contrapuntal fabric and combined with music of contrasting character.