Toccata and Fugue in F Major

I asked myself in the previous essay why it would be inappropriate to play the Craig Phillips setting of Sine Nomine as a prelude because of its virtuosity, but the Bach Toccata in F is perhaps more appropriate.

Most often, my decisions about the appropriateness of an anthem, hymn, or voluntary are based on an inarticulate sense of the rightness or wrongness of an item for a particular point in the liturgy, based on my experience with music and the liturgy, my sense of the people in this place, and the capabilities of choir, organist, and congregation.

But, after further thought and practice on the Bach, I think I can articulate the way in which it differs from the Phillips. In the latter, there is a sense in which some of the virtuosity is for its own sake -- “showing off,” if you will. It was composed for an occasion for which that was appropriate. Because it is firmly based on a hymn tune, I considered it appropriate for the Sunday on which we sang the hymn, but not as a prelude. A postlude allows somewhat more scope for virtuosity, mostly because those who are not interested in music can escape to the coffee hour. The Bach is equally virtuosic (and more difficult), with its two extended pedal solos early in the toccata. But every note of the Bach is in service of the musical idea that is laid out in the opening two-voice canon over tonic pedal point, and my sense is that this musical idea is appropriate for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Year A.

In fact, I am unable to name any mature work of Bach that exhibits virtuosity for its own sake. If there is any virtuosity present, it is a virtuosity of compositional skill in the execution of the underlying ideas, not in the exterior aspects of the performance. This is one characteristic that separates J. S. Bach from a perfectly serviceable composer such as Craig Phillips. To put it in terms of Bach's contemporaries, this is one way in which Bach differs from Telemann, a good musician whom the city fathers of Leipzig would have preferred to Bach. He would not have demanded as much of them as listeners.

So what idea is this that Bach is communicating, and that I consider a good fit for the Last Sunday of Pentecost, Year A? The phrases that come to mind are from Psalm 47: “Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with a cry of joy.... For God is King of all the earth; sing praises with all your skill.” This Sunday is the end of the liturgical year, wherein thoughts turn to the end of days. In the Daily Office, we have made our way to the end of the Revelation of St. John the Divine; in the Sunday Gospel, we hear of the Day of Doom, “when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him” (St. Matthew 25:31). There will in this day be weeping and gnashing of teeth as the wicked go away into everlasting punishment (v. 46), but it will be as well a day of victory, when the last Enemy, death, is overcome forever (Revelation 20:14). And it will be the day of final and complete answer to the daily prayer of Holy Mother Church: “Thy kingdom come.”

The Bach Toccata in F, with its Fugue, is the best response to this that I can make with the music available to me. The Toccata is boundless joy, the serious and all-consuming joy that is characteristic of the praise of God, the working out of one of the grandest ideas in all of Bach's music. The Fugue is more solemn. In the context of this service, I hope that it can be an expression (insofar as humanly possible) of the majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ at the right hand of God, sitting as righteous Judge of all the earth. When the two subjects combine in the final pages of the fugue, it is inexpressibly majestic, and causes me to consider the completion of the purposes of God, determined before the foundation of the earth.

These words are but a stammering and inadequate attempt to say what cannot be said. Yet, dust and ashes that we are, we must say something. No: we must sing something, and in this case, instrumental music has the advantage that it sings without words. And we cannot, for this occasion, play it safe; we must “sing... with all [our] skill.” This piece is right on the edge of my capabilities; that makes it just about right.

As Bach would say – and did say, at the end of nearly every one of his scores:
Soli Deo gloria.

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Here is a performance of the toccata by Helmut Walcha. For those who attend my parish, he was the teacher of D.D., and this is a much better performance than what you will hear on Sunday.