Eclecticism

Here’s something interesting I hadn’t run across before — apparently there are strong arguments that Bach’s famous organ piece “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” not only wasn’t originally written for organ…but likely wasn’t even written by Bach at all.

The clues lie in the music. For one, Bach’s manuscript copy of the Toccata — the handwritten original — is lost, if it ever existed. That means attribution can’t be certain; it’s akin to trying a murder case without a dead body.

Like a good mystery, the sources are questionable, too. The earliest copy of the Toccata was done by a man with a reputation of passing off spurious works under Bach’s name.

However, the biggest questions arise when the Toccata is examined stylistically.

“It is a little worrying when literally the first and last notes of a piece of music raise doubts,” writes Peter Williams in a seminal article about the Toccata in the journal Early Music in 1981.

Neat stuff. Part of what caught my eye was this passage:

Scholars now think the Toccata was originally a violin piece Bach transcribed.

“If you know the piece you can just see it was written for the violin,” says Don Franklin, a Pitt musicologist specializing in the composer. “It has idiomatic figuration for the violin [and] the initial statement of the fugue subject can easily be played on the D string, crossing over to touch the G string.”

The opening of the Toccata, too, is violin-like, offering “the solo violin an opportunity to drop down through its four strings,” writes Williams. And there are other nuances that add up to an organ piece covering up its origins.

One of my favorite versions of the piece is by Vanessa-Mae off her fourth album, “The Violin Player“. While decidedly not a traditional interpretation (Bach’s original manuscripts are notably devoid of notations for samples and drum machines), it is incredibly well done, and one of the first times I’d heard the piece as a solo violin performance.