142: Monster Toccata in F, BWV 540

About four years ago I made an episode about Bach’s ‘longest’ piece:

Somehow I missed a piece which should definitely be in contention for his ‘longest.’ At 437 measures, the Toccata in F, BWV 540, is (I think!)the longest stretch of Bach’s music, in terms of measures. It probably also holds the record for longest single note. Take a look at page one— an inanimate object could play the pedal part on page one:

From easiest pedal page, to tap-dancing nightmare, the feet on the very next page:

…and all that happens twice. What a piece! Over 170 measures of pedal drones and pedal ballet before this piece finally gets modulating. An arpeggio motif (what I call the spiral in the episode) gets passed through each voice, high to low:

These arpeggios occur in all major keys but one, and many minor keys. How’s this for tonally exhaustive?

Bach eludes the expectations of the listener three times in stunning deceptive cadences, after which, the B-A-C-H motif appears (in transposition) in the pedals:

If you play this piece, you’ll face the issue of whether or not to play the high D. The organs lacked this high D, but did Bach want this effect anyhow?

Ullrich Böhme’s excellent rendition (with fugue!)

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Transcript:

Thanks for listening. Thank you for tuning in. I think you’ll be blown away by today’s piece, perhaps the longest piece. What is Bach’s Longest Piece and His Shortest? Probably not, but what I was really After was the longest uninterrupted stretch of music. So it seems like you could count that in two ways. The longest amount of measures or the longest amount of beats. And as I found going through the entire oeuvre or trying to count every single... There are a half dozen pieces that contain over 400 measures, and that’s massive, massive in terms of measures or bars, but all of these pieces are in the quick meter of 3.8. So if it’s actually pulses we’re after, then you see any piece that’s in 4.4 has more than twice the amount of beats than a piece in 3.8. So I don’t understand how to count this. This whole exercise became very superfluous and probably not very meaningful, but I did forget. Somehow I missed this one piece, today’s piece, this Toccata, that actually does, I think, I think unless I’m missing another one, this actually does have the most measures in any piece of Bach. It is 437 bars long. That’s a full 10 bars longer than the previous record holder, the piece that I thought had the most measures in that episode from 2022. But this piece, this Toccata, also holds some very interesting... This has the longest pedal point, I believe, the longest single sustained note in all of Bach’s music. If you look at the first page, I will show the image in the Substack description, you’ll see the first This page is nothing but a giant pedal point. Your left foot is stuck down to this pedal note, holding a note for 54 measures. That’s longer than most pieces, 54 measures. And here you are just holding one note. If you play the piano, for example, if you’re not comfortable playing with your feet on the organ, but if you do want... To feel the experience of playing one and a half pages of Bach’s organ music with not much trouble, start here. Your left foot just simply holds one note for one and a half pages. So this is the Toccata in F Major, BWV 540. It belongs to a Toccata in Fugue. We’ll do the Toccata today, the Fugue later. But here I want to zoom out. I tried to make this episode last week. I don’t know, I was working half the day and it just sort of fell apart. I try my best to be like a storyteller with Bach and for some reason my narrative was off. It just sounded like I was saying and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens. Even I was losing the plot. I listened back to it and I was sort of overwhelmed. So I scrapped the entire episode and I’m starting again from a new vantage point. So sorry for no episode last Tuesday. That’s why. Let’s try this. This piece, this giant piece of 437 measures is a conversation between two shapes. One is short and the other is a long shape. So heading over to the organ here, the short shape is like this. This is an arpeggio or a spiral. It’s brief. And it will come in many different keys. The longer shape is more snake-like. It’s like this. You’ll be amazed to see how long this snake can grow. The conversation of these two ideas lasts for 437 measures of essentially an uninterrupted stream of 16th notes, a gigantic river of these 16th notes stopping only a few times to be punctuated with some really stubborn 8th note chords like this. These eighth note chords will sort of be alarmingly halting. It’s like when you’re on a long run or a long bike ride or something and then you have to stop at a crosswalk. That’s how this feels. But those three things are the entire piece. If you can hold on to those three things, you’ll be fine while listening to this piece. So it’s the spiral, the snake, and the eighth notes. You might be asking, but what about the pedal points? Well, this piece is flanked by those pedal points. Two giant pedal points, which began the piece, and two shorter pedal points, which end the piece. And in between, we have the fast succession of those three Those three ideas don’t really get talking until well into the middle of the piece. So now, like Milton, I’m going to start in medias res, in the middle of things. I’m going to start at bar 176, where the short shape... It comes in for the first time, and I’m going to play only the sixteenth notes of the short and long shapes. You can hear how this piece is that constant stream of sixteenth notes, and I’ll play the stubborn eighth note chords when they come in. This is like an outline. It’s everything that happens in the piece, and then we’ll go back and fill it in. The short shape in the pedals. Soprano, alto, tenor, pedals. Again, soprano, alto, tenor, Pedals. Again. Pedals. One more time. Maybe two more times. Pedals. Soprano. Alto. Tenor. A bit longer. Now here are the eighth notes.

Nowhere’s a surprising chord. Very surprising chord. Again, more spirals. Now here’s our long shape. First time we have the long shape from top to bottom. Into the pedals. Now eighth notes. And the snake. Right hand. Into the left hand. Into the pedals. Climbing up. And now conversation. Left hand. Right hand. Now pedals and left hand. Two lines together. We’re coming out of the snake into the spiral. Here starts the spiral. Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Pedals. Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Pedals. We’re modulating through all kinds of keys again. E major, pedals, all the way to the top. Soprano, Alto, a longer line now. Eighth notes again, here they are. No weird chord, no weird chord, straight into the snake. Left hand, pedals. Right hand. Pedals, left hand, right hand and pedals, two at the same time. Left hand, right hand, we’re coming out of the snake into the spirals again. Soprano, alto, tenor, pedals, over and over. Again, soprano, pedals. Soprano once more. Here come the eighth notes. And we are going to have a strange chord. How strange? Spirals. More spirals. And now the snake from top to left hand to pedals. Eighth notes, now the snake in the pedals. In the right hand. In the left hand. The conversation, right hand. Pedals, now two, right hand and left hand. Now here’s the craziest scale you’ve ever heard. Coming out of the snake into the spiral. Soprano. Alto. Alto. Tenor. Pedals, you get it by now. Soprano. One more time, and then all of a sudden we find ourselves here in B-flat major in the subdominant, and this is our penultimate pedal point. So we’re back to the pedal points that flank the entire piece. That is a lot, right? But that is the dark meat of the piece. After this, these pedal points that surround it are just pure joy, just fluffy dessert surrounding that very dense nutrition. Imagine playing this music over the grave. No pressure, no pressure, just Bach is buried beneath, probably listening to all your mistakes. I’m going to play the parts I just dissected and see if you can identify the three motifs at play, the eighth notes, which Those are the easiest to hear, you can’t miss those really. The spiral, the arpeggios, going from soprano to alto to tenor to pedals, a little easier to hear. And the snake motif, these longer lines, can you hear that too? Any music that you think, hmm, I’m not sure which music that is, that’s the snake. Weaving his way in and out of all the parts, sometimes you can see him darting under the grass, appearing from behind the alto lines, sneaking under the tenor. And with that small amount of stasis, that B-flat pedal point, we get to the penultimate pedal point again, and we are now out of the thick of the piece. That is more than half the piece. By the way, what excellent playing, what an amazing interpretation of this piece, this Ulrich Böhm. I suppose if you’re going to be the organist in the church where Bach worked, you’d better know how to play that thing. Just a few things that I want to point our attention to. We’ve heard twice, and we will hear a third time when I finally play the ending. This sneaky chord, this ultra-deceptive cadence. These moments, you obviously think the music will go... No, Bach says... Fake out. They are intriguing in and of themselves, just these... On those very moments there, on the very elusive note in the pedal, the four upcoming notes in the pedal are this. Yes, those of you who have been listening for a while recognize that as the B-A-C-H motif. It occurs in transposition in every instance. The first one we hear, A flat, G, B. The second one, Db, C, Eb, D. And the last one we haven’t heard yet because it comes so very close to the end. Cb, Bb, Db, C natural. So we have a possible signature here, although I don’t like to think of it as a signature because Bach’s own name in music, when he spells it out, it’s so highly chromatic. To think that Bach would write chromatic music and not be signing his name is also equally plausible. But indeed, there you have on those deceptive chords a B-A-C-H in the pedals. It has been seen throughout history. The second thing I want to point out is the range of the keyboard. It goes to a high C. All the organs in Bach’s day have this C as the limit, thus the D up here is not there. We have the D in harpsichord music, but the organs generally stop at this high C, so this means one particular passage here, these chords. That’s a high D up there. Modern editors will think that, well, Bach was limited by this C, this high C, so he really wanted to compose this. This high D up there. But he couldn’t, so he had to write this. I don’t know. I mean, they’re both very convincing. Herr Böhm, just in his recording there, played it as is written, not going up the octave. So what do you like? Here are the two options. That would be the modern edition. And here’s actually what’s on the page. Right, intriguing, isn’t it? It’s like you start thinking, well, maybe in fact Bach really didn’t want the octave transposition. Maybe Bach knew exactly what he was doing. And maybe that sort of opposite effect, instead of going as he does in every other instance, maybe he wanted this. Maybe he really wanted that shape. So just as the deceptive cadence, that highly deceptive cadence in the B-A-C-H motif came three times, another idea comes three times that I want to draw your attention to. And there being really three staves of organ music, your right hand, your left hand, and your feet, there are these three parts that Bach will juggle around. You’ve got two lines at a time, so you begin with your left hand and your pedals playing in parallels like this. So we have two lines singing together. But on top of that, you have this line very melodiously. Altogether. So what I’ll do now, just because I love showing you different lines in different areas of your speaker, I will play, I suppose, this sighing motif in both your speakers, but I will separate the other two lines in your other two speakers. So here’s the first time that it happens where the sighing motif is taken in the right hand. Okay, I’m going to redo that because I think I confused myself. The right hand will be in the right speaker, your left hand will be in your left speaker, and your pedals will be between both speakers. So let me try that again. The sign motif first appears in your right speaker, and let me just speed that up just a bit. Okay, better. Now, the sign motif is in your left speaker, therefore in your left hand, you’re playing the parallel snake figure between your right hand and the pedals. Here we go again. I don’t know if this is educational or just kind of sounding cool, hopefully a bit of both. Here is the last iteration when you will hear in both speakers now and the snake figure in different speakers, so one snake on your right, one snake on your left, and the pedal sighing figure between both speakers. Last iteration. Okay, and then if you’re looking at the score, this is bar 348. I mentioned something on the way through when it was dissected that this was the craziest scale you’ve ever heard. Why is this so crazy? It sounds like this. It’s taken in the feet. Why does that sound so weird? If I say the note names aloud, we hear a scale, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B flat, right? It sounds like D, E, F sharp, G, A, B flat. Bach says, you know, it’s not enough to write a scale. No, how about every other note is taken the octave below. So instead of D, E, I’ll go D, E. And then instead of F, G, I’ll go F, G. Instead of A, B, I’ll go A, B. And the result is that a shape which sounds to your ear like this comes out like this. How amazing, how amazing is that? Transformed into... We might have to hear that on the synthesizer because this has so many overtones in the organ that I’m not quite getting that beautiful and highly innovative effect. Normal scale. Bach scale. Amazing. Just incredible. We could apply that principle to any melody, like if I were to play this one. And drop every other note down the octave, it would sound something like... Harder than that seems. Good brain exercise, by the way. But yeah, just take a simple shape and drop every other note down the octave and you get... Yes, indeed, the Bach scale.

Okay, now that we’ve got into the meat of the piece, we’ve had our vegetables, we can enjoy the dessert, which is obviously the delight of playing this piece, is the opening. Speaking of records, most amount of measures, longest single held note, I think there’s also probably the record for the longest pedal solo in the repertoire, and there’s two of them. There’s one that’s 26 bars and the other that is 33 bars long. Again, there are other Pedal solos in common time, so is it most measures or most beats? Doesn’t really matter. These are long, long pedal solos. Some of the great pedal work in the repertoire. This is leg day for all of you hitting the gym in your organ loft in church. Don’t skip leg day. It’s so amazing. Bach, the first page for your pedals. It’s like the easiest thing on earth, right? Just sitting here. It’s almost like there’s a leak in the pipe. But then you turn the page and ugh, the hardest thing imaginable. What is this? This is going to take a few days. A few years? So, the piece begins with the snake figure, which I will now do without the drone. Because I want you to... Imagine how a drone would sound. Just keep in your mind that there’s this fixed sound, this fixed note anchoring everything because, remarkably, the piece will modulate even though it’s fixed to this pedal point. The piece will modulate from F to Bb major and yet there’s still the drone because F is a common tone in both F major and B. B-flat major. So Bach knows this, and he uses his fine spider web to fasten his ankle to the stone of F. So let’s hear this opening, how many measures? 54 measures. 54 measures without the drone. How amazing is that? Just a constant outpouring of sixteenth notes. No, what do they call him? The Brook. He babbled like this divine source of water. Now, I’m not about to be one of those people who say, I want the audience to sing along. Everybody, hold this pitch here. But if you do want to go back and listen to that entire stream of sixteenth notes while humming this note, I feel like it’s some spiritual Indian raga stuff. It is profound to know that just one note is going that entire time and then all of a sudden one of the biggest pedal solos ever. Here’s bar 55 in the feet.

Tap dancing. That is tap dancing. And Bach’s not done yet. I mean, he stopped everything. He stopped the stream of 16th notes after 80 measures of something with his bum, bum, bum, with that 8th note stubborn chord figure. But then he starts again, and this time he’ll go even lower. Now, the very lowest note of the pedal board. This would be the biggest pipe on an organ. And he starts again in C major. And he will now, just like he modulated while holding a drone in the previous section, he will still modulate again, doing the same thing, but somehow it feels bigger. And the pedal solo, which I will go straight into after the big drone, is even longer, 33 bars long. How about this? How about this? And where are we now? Where are we now? We’re back at bar 176, where we started our story. Did I lose the reader? Is this plot okay? Four pages of drone bliss, of deity intoning humming, four pages of mad tap dancing all over the pedal board, to the top F, this highest possible note on the pedal board, a rarity in Bach’s music to see this high F, this F here. Probably composed for a very specific organ. In fact, there’s this interesting copy, a copy by Krebs, K-R-E-B-S. Charming, actually. The father made the copy of the Toccata, and son made the copy of the Fugue. Isn’t that touching? You know, father and son, you copy the Prelude, I’ll copy the Fugue. How lovely. Anyways, this copy by Krebs rewrites that last pedal solo that I just played to go not above the C. So it doesn’t even go above middle C, let alone to the high F. So you could see that work. Books were organic in this sort of way that they could be rewritten depending on certain organs. And this very expansive work for pedals clearly called for a special organ. So yes, we’re back at bar 176 where we began our adventure. Can we wrap up this adventure at that penultimate pedal point? Feels so good to say penultimate pedal point. So here we are, bar 367, and we arrive at just... A four and a half bar pedal point. It’s only four and a half bars. One, two, three, four and a half bars, yes. And the snake figure in the left hand and the eighth notes in the right hand. So we could imagine this eighth note, these punctuated chords are no longer as arresting because they’re smoothed out With this lovely 16th note flowing river all over the subdominant pedal point here. And then we just have a few more of these arpeggios. Together with everything we have this. And then more eighth notes. But we’re not gonna go into some very intense minor mode. We’re going to go into a rather calm move from the subdominant all the way down to the very bottom of the pedalboard, starting from the pedals. So we can see that the suspensions, the long notes. The long notes really help bring us home, just guide this insane vehicle to a stop. One more time. And here we are at the, again, once more, the very bottom note, the lowest possible pitch, the biggest pipe, and we have another long, let me see, one, two, three, a 23-bar pedal point here. So about half the length of the first two pedal points, and we have more beautiful ideas coming from this drone. Here is the music without the drone. And now if I play it with this lowest note, we have this wonderful music. Might have played a few wrong notes in there, oh well. And now we have this sort of a transfer of the drone here, which I love. We transfer the drone from this C here to this C. But you know, the whole time, still Cs. This one. Now this. And now this one. So we’ve got this idea of this C moving to this C, moving to this C, moving to this C, moving to finally our last deceptive cadence. And then we’re only a few bars from the end of the piece. So from the so-called transfer of the drone,

And there you have the entire 437 measures of this Toccata in F major. What an incredible work of art. I was just thinking as I was playing that last little page here where it goes into D flat major followed by G flat major followed by E flat major followed by A flat major but then A, you know, rising to G. I mean, these keys, they must sound like I’ve got this organ tuned to a Silbermann, sixth comma temperament, so... How does this sound? G flat major. F sharp minor. F sharp minor sounds quite nice. B flat minor. E flat minor sounds a bit rough. But A flat minor. Anyhow, I was just thinking, I wonder if Bach has an arpeggio in every single key. Because when you learn this piece, especially in your feet, you think, oh god, now I really have to shed my... C minor arpeggio followed by, oh, okay, my B flat major arpeggio. It’s really exhaustive in the amount of keys, so I’ll think about that and maybe put a note in the episode description of how many of the 24 possible Here is the piece, because I thought that sounded pretty nice, in... Different areas of your speaker split. You will hear the right hand in your right speaker, the left hand in your left speaker, and the pedals in both speakers, followed, of course, by that magnificent version by Ullrich Böhme. And don’t forget to join Substack so you can see the description where I’m going to put a link to the video where he plays this in St. Thomas Church live, you know, in front of the grave of Bach. And I love that the people there in this video are Can’t see Ulrich. They can’t see it, so they just have to sit there facing away from this music in contemplation. That is such a beautiful idea that you can’t look at the performer. You cannot eat this music with your eyes. Like so much of us today, all we do with music is we see it with our eyes. We don’t really listen to it. But here, you’re forced to listen to it. You’re forced to actually turn away from the music, face the other direction. You can’t even see if the performer is flamboyant or not. Beautiful, beautiful idea.

Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate your support. Your notes from everywhere makes me very happy that you’re listening. And I hope you really got something out of this as usual. I hope you can now hear this work with fresh ears. Maybe you don’t know this work and now you’re listening with a fresh brain. What do you think of this monumental work, this toccata, this giant 437... The fugue, too, is very special. Very, very special. I will try and get that soon as well on the show. Spoiler alert, it’s a double fugue. Now, here is the marvelous Ulrich Böhm. Next week, a special guest.