J.S. Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Were it not for Johann Sebastian Bach, the musical term "fugue" would be known to only a handful of people. However, the short piece known as Toccata and Fugue in D minor, sometimes simply called "fugue in D minor" belongs to the cultural heritage of half the world. The piece is the master of harmony's best-known work and is perhaps the most famous "fugue" of all the fugues that have ever been, even though it is written for organ, an instrument that many of us have never even come close to seeing.

A youth work
It is a work of his youth and belongs to the "free forms" for organs of that period, which include fantasias, various compositions, and solo fugues without a corresponding prelude (or, toccata, a term after the baroque era).
It was presumably composed during the first years of his stay in Weimar (1708 - 1717) or, even earlier, while he was an organist in Arnstadt (1703 - 1707). That is, at the time of its creation Bach may have been under twenty years old, or at the most, in his early twenties.

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565
The work was published only in 1833 thanks to the efforts of Felix Mendelssohn. Like so many other pieces by different authors, its popularity in the last seventy years is due to its inclusion in the soundtrack of the 1940 film Fantasia.

J.S. Bach (1685 - 1750), in 1715

The piece, highly dramatic and majestic, has two typical sections. The toccata is a free introduction (hence the original name, prelude) built on the basis of rapid scales and arpeggios. And the fugue, like all fugues, interweaves and overlaps repetitions of a main theme weaving a complex interplay of voices, four in this case.

The performance is by the German composer and organist Hans-André Stamm, playing the Trost organ (built between 1724-30 by Tobias Heinrich Gottfried Trost) of the Stadtkirche, in Walterhausen, Germany, with whose image we head this article.