page_title: Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
section_title: Performances and recordings
hierarchical_section_title: Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 / Reception / Performances and recordings
caption_attribution_description: English: Programme of Organ Concert in the Thomaskirche, Leipzig, given by Felix Mendelssohn in 1840
context_page_description: The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music written, according to its oldest extant sources, by Johann Sebastian Bach. The piece opens with a toccata section, followed by a fugue that ends in a coda. It is one of the most famous works in the organ repertoire.
  Scholars differ as to when it was composed. It could have been as early as c.1704, which would be one explanation for the unusual features; alternatively, a date as late as the 1750s has been suggested. To a large extent, the piece conforms to the characteristics deemed typical for the north German organ school of the Baroque era with divergent stylistic influences, such as south German characteristics.
  Despite a profusion of educated guesswork, there is not much that can be said with certainty about the first century of the composition's existence other than that it survived that period in a manuscript written by Johannes Ringk. The first publication of the piece, in the Bach Revival era, was in 1833, through the efforts of Felix Mendelssohn, who also performed the piece in an acclaimed concert in 1840.
context_section_description: The first major public performance was by Mendelssohn, on 6 August 1840, in Leipzig. The concert was very well received by the critics, among them Robert Schumann, who admired the work's famous opening as an example of Bach's sense of humor. 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 U.S. in 1911 on Columbia 10-inch disc A945 and in the U.K. 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 the 1950s, a recording of Helmut Walcha playing BWV 565 on organ was released. 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, in the 1960s BWV 565 became listed first; but by the 1980s, the font size of 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. Similarly, the album sleeves of Marie-Claire Alain's recordings of BWV 565 in the 1960s, listed the piece in the same font as the other recorded works, but by the 1980s, it was in a larger font. 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.
caption: Program of Mendelssohn's 1840 organ concert: BWV 565 is listed as last piece by Bach, before the "Freie Phantasie" which was an improvisation by Mendelssohn.
exif: {}