Toccata in D minor (opening)

No manuscript of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor in Bach's hand survives. The piece is known from a single copy made by Johannes Ringk, a pupil of Johann Peter Kellner, who copied a good deal of Bach's music. It was first printed in 1833, in an edition of little-known Bach organ works that Felix Mendelssohn planned, and Mendelssohn gave its first big public performance in Leipzig in 1840. The Bach-Gesellschaft edition, the one this page is read from, printed it in 1867.

Whether Bach wrote it at all has been argued since 1981, when the organ scholar Peter Williams published an article asking the question outright. The piece does things Bach's other organ works do not, and the only source is one copy by somebody else's pupil. Williams's own suggestion was that it began as a piece for solo violin, now lost, and that its oddities are an arranger's. Nothing has settled it, and editions and recordings still print Bach's name.

On the organ, the opening is handed down the keyboard. The right hand plays the first statement of the mordent and its falling run in octaves. The two hands take the second an octave lower, the left hand plays the third alone an octave lower again, and then the pedal comes in on a low D under a diminished seventh chord that is rolled up from the bottom and resolves to D major. That is the part everybody knows, and it is all this page carries.

Walt Disney's Fantasia opens with it, in Leopold Stokowski's orchestral arrangement played by the Philadelphia Orchestra. The film came out in 1940, and for a lot of people that is where they first heard it.

A mandolin cannot play octaves down a keyboard, so this page is one line: the top note of each statement. The first sits on the A at the fifth fret of the E course. The second and third both sit on the A an octave down, because the third, as written, would run below the open G. The runs are written as eighths, which is slower than any organist plays them, and the page ends on the D major chord's top note, where the opening gesture ends. Play the mordent crisply, let each landing D ring, and take your time over the pauses. The fermatas belong to you.