Fantasy & Fugue in C minor BWV 537

arranged for orchestra by Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

“Now that my poor wife has gone,” Elgar wrote to Eugene Goossens in 1921, “I can’t be original and so I depend on people like John Sebastian for a source of inspiration.” His arrangement of Bach’s organ Fugue in C minor was, in fact, the first thing he wrote after the death of Lady Elgar in 1920. It was completed in April 1921 and first performed under Goossens - who apparently “sat a little heavily on it” - at the Queen’s Hall six months later. The orchestration of the Fantasia that goes with it came later and, if Richard Strauss had accepted the challenge, it might not have happened at all. Early in 1922, on his first visit to London after the First World War, Strauss had had a discussion with Elgar about orchestrating Bach’s organ works and had expressed his preference for a more restrained approach than that adopted by Elgar in his arrangement of the Fugue in C minor. Elgar’s riposte was to invite Strauss to orchestrate the C minor Fantasy. Strauss apparently avoided the issue, however, and Elgar got to work on it himself, completing the score in June 1922.

If Strauss believed that Elgar’s Bach was lacking in restraint one can guess what he thought of the brilliantly colourful, sometimes even lurid orchestrations of Bach organ music by their contemporary Leopold Stokowski. In comparison with “Bachowski,” as it was known by the more sceptical, the Bachgar Fantasia in C minor is self-restraint personified. It sounds almost modest enough and certainly sensitive enough, except in the oddly unidiomatic harp flourishes, to have been orchestrated by Brahms, whose Symphony in C minor is brought to mind at an early stage. The treatment of the Fugue, as befits the vigorous physique of the music itself, is rather more extravagant. Determined not to make Bach sound “pretty,” Elgar said, “I wanted to show how gorgeous and great and brilliant he would have made himself sound if he had our means.” While you can hear what Strauss meant, you also get a vividly clear and positively dramatic profile of the structure of the piece.

Rupert Avis©2003