Toccatas for keyboard (complete)

Among the lingering uncertainties in Bach scholarship are reliable dates for the early keyboard works. Bach’s talent clearly impressed all who knew him. And although not a prodigy like Mozart, he was almost certainly turning out substantial works by around his 15th year (i.e, 1700). It should be noted that Bach did not have a long-term, regular music teacher. Instead he picked up techniques, styles, tricks, and maxims here and there by observation, occasional tutelage, and experimentation. Hence Bach’s earliest works reveal a gradual transition from literal copying or arranging of other composers’ material to the creation of distinctive, original pieces.
One influence in particular would prove critical to his first compositional attempts: the North German school of organists, including Johann Reincken, Georg Böhm, and Dietrich Buxtehude. Bach’s 200-mile walk to observe Buxtehude in late 1705 is a fairly well-known and true story, but he also drew deeply from Reincken and Böhm’s example. These three men were masters of their instrument and had given new luster to the free, improvisatory genres of prelude, fantasy, and toccata. Their efforts live on in the keyboard toccatas written by Bach probably between 1708 and 1712. We believe that Bach wrote these harpsichord toccatas as practice pieces for organists. (Like many musicians in his generation, Bach earned money from his organ duties rather than as a freelance harpsichordist.) And it’s no coincidence that these pieces likely date from either Mühlhausen or the first months in Weimar—two cities in which the young man had been engaged as court organist.
Origins of the toccata genre, from the Italian word toccare or “touch”, extend back into the late 1500s. It had been used by Italian madrigal composers, such as Merulo and Pasquini, for highly figurated keyboard works. The term referenced the physicality of the music: sampling numerous textures all the way from lyric, legato passages to virtuosic, rapid figuration across the full keyboard. Examples by Girolamo Frescobaldi, active in both Ferrara and Rome, moved the genre ahead by virtue of their harmonic drive and greater length.
Possibly the most important contribution Bach made to the genre was to insert complete fugues at numerous points within the form. In each of his harpsichord toccatas, fugues alternate with slower, ornamented sections. They betray their affinity with the 17th century and are multi-sectional works of contrasting tempi and character not unlike the Corellian sonata da chiesa. In that respect they are quite different from Bach’s later toccatas and fugues for organ, dating from around 1717 and after. The organ versions feature precisely two distinct parts—a virtuosic, improvisatory toccata followed by a fugue. Each is self-contained and complete; no harm would essentially be done to perform a toccata without its ensuing fugue, or vice versa (though purists would be appalled to even consider such sacrilege). With the harpsichord toccatas, fugues and fugal passages are integrated into the piece, creating not separate movements but simply multiple sections.
The brilliant Toccata in F-sharp minor makes precisely this point. The initial passagework is followed by a reverential section in longer, “antique style” triple-rhythm notes. Next comes a fast three-voice fugue, a return to slower tempo and conventional harmonic sequences, succeeded by a different, chromatic fugue in four voices. Bach even rounds off the work with a full coda, which recollects the opening virtuosic runs before concluding with a glance back at the second fugue theme. This kind of integration and thematic recall is just one of the ways Bach developed the toccata into a more comprehensive form.
In the G-major Toccata, we discover a clearer distinction between fast and slow “movements”, with a fast-slow-fast progression familiar from the Baroque concerto. The opening section runs through a whole gamut of textures, from arpeggios and broken chords to the rather unique sliding block chords heard in mm. 3-4 and elsewhere. A poignant Adagio in E minor provides contrast. As an additional echo of concerto form, Bach closes the Adagio on an expectant half cadence (to be precise, the V/vi chord) that creates continuity directly into the final Allegro, a three-voice fugue.
The final work on the program, the Toccata in C Minor, follows the rapid changes of mood and texture of the F-sharp minor example heard earlier. Barely one minute of improvisatory flourish and Bach turns to a grave Adagio, with moments to be played piano (i.e., “softly”) indicated in his own hand. This episode yields to a delightful three-voice fugue. What saves such pieces from being a mere succession of episodes, a mere litany of formal devices, is Bach’s sense of tonal drive and balance—alternately moving forward and making parenthetical insertions at the right moments to achieve variety within unity.

The damage would be much more severe if one tried to avoid the fugue portions in the harpsichord toccatas. Consider the Toccata in E minor. The first fugue comes in directly at the end of a very short introduction. Moreover, the voices do not enter in succession, but rather Bach begins immediately with counterpoint in two parts. The third section, Adagio, features the older style of toccata texture (simple harmonies prolonged by different figuration and contour) before a brilliant and vigorous three-voice fugue in the best Italian manner carries the day. In sum, the first fugue cannot be excised without re-composing what Bach wrote to create some kind of artificial link to the Adagio; the concluding fugue, while self-contained, provides proper sense of “rousing finish” after the slow third section. Both are integral to the work’s completeness.
One of the other features of the toccata, at least by the time of Frescobaldi, was a contrast between sections in free, almost “unmeasured” tempo and those in a predictable meter. This contrast marks the opening of Bach’s D-major toccata, where a brief fantasia in pure D major yields to a measured, dance-like Allegro. The third section, a broad Adagio in B minor, is larger than most slow portions in the toccatas. It includes echoes of the opening fantasia (the written-out tremolos), insertions of Presto tempo, and snatches of fugue. The real fugue derives its character from dance, albeit dance music of a virtuosic persuasion with steady sixteenth notes. The close overlap of hands suggests performance on two manuals.
Many features of the traditional toccata appear in the opening section of the D-minor toccata. It opens with a skipping violin-style figure before moving to passagi of brilliant scales and broken chords. The remainder of the first section includes a lengthy passage built on the traditional circle-of-fifths harmonic sequence. The following three-voice fugue actually starts out as a canon (both voices entering on exactly the same pitches). Bach manages to uncover new means of enlivening the main theme through harmony and rhythm, in a form (fugue) that he was to employ literally hundreds of times. The third movement withdraws to a darker emotional mood as it obsessively repeats a certain four-note figure. At the end, of course, another fugue. This last subject hints at being an inversion of the earlier fugue subject (section 2), but such details pale in comparison to the sheer exuberance Bach achieves.

(c) Jason Stell