Toccata in D major BWV 912 (c 1710)

To Bach and his contemporaries “toccata” did not mean what it came to mean to later generations – like Schumann and Prokofiev, to name the composers of only the most famous examples of the toccata as a virtuso display of digital energy driven by much the same rhythms and at much the same breathless tempo throughout. All seven of Bach’s harpsichord toccatas, which are thought to have been written during (or even before) his period of director music at the court of Weimar, are in several movements with no fixed pattern except that they all end with a fugue.

Perhaps the most interesting of them is the Toccata in D, above all for the fugue in F sharp minor in the middle of it. Although the incidence of that fairly remote key is surprising, it does not come without discreet warnings: the cheerful rondo-like Allegro in D major that follows the virtuoso prelude modulates several times to F sharp minor, if never for more than a bar or so at a time. What establishes the new key is the dramatic, coloufully scored Adagio recitative that leads directly into the central fugue. The return to D major is made by way of another recitative-cadenza (marked con discrezione) and is celebrated in the last section which, presumably because there has already been one serious example of the form, is as much a gigue as it is a fugue.