All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Sept. 28, 2021 - Skeptoid
18:12
Skeptoid #799: On the Authorship of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

The most famous organ work in history has a surprising mystery -- we're not really sure who composed it! Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Bach's Famous Organ Piece 00:10:10
The most famous organ piece in history is one that you've heard a million times.
Even if you don't know its name, and even if you don't know its composer, which, spoiler alert, I'll tell you right now, it's the Takata ⁇ Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach.
At least, that's the traditional view.
Some say it wasn't written by him at all.
Turns out to be a real detective story, but where will it lead us?
The authorship of the Takata and Fugue is right now on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The Extended Premium Show available now.
Come to Skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com on the authorship of the Takata and Fugue in D Minor.
It is, by a huge margin, the most famous and best-known organ work on Earth.
Its famous opening is iconic in the truest sense of the word, immediately recognized by nearly everyone, even if they don't know its title.
To its fans, it is a wild sweeping ride that tests the abilities of both its instrument and its performer, who must draw every last bit of flexibility from both hands and both feet across multiple manuals and a pedal board.
It is, almost inevitably, by one of the very greatest composers of music, the incomparable Johann Sebastian Bach, with whose name it is nearly synonymous.
Or, is it?
For some 50 years, some musicologists have been casting doubt on this attribution and argued that the Takata and Fugue was most likely composed by someone else.
To some, this is unspeakable heresy, but to others, it is a valid historical question.
If your primary residence is underneath a rock, it may be necessary to briefly introduce the piece.
Its formal name is the Takata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, where BWV is the Bach Verke Vircheitsnes, the most authoritative catalogue of the works authored by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Most performances run about nine minutes in length.
It is a Baroque work, meaning that it was in the style of and composed during the Baroque era in Europe, considered to be about 1600 to 1750.
A discussion of Baroque music is beyond the scope of this episode, and any one thing that I might cherry-pick to say about it would trigger a deluge of criticism from music experts.
But one familiar characteristic you can think of to differentiate Baroque from classical is that Baroque tends to feature structured complexity, while classical tends to be more free-flowing and lyrical.
Such an introduction to a musical piece as this may seem glaringly incomplete, as it's missing some pretty basic information.
First, that we don't know when it was composed, as there is no existing known score of it written in its original composer's hand.
only later copies by others.
Second, we don't know what instrument it was originally composed for.
Organ is the most probable, but there are competing theories, including that it was adapted from a piece originally written for violin, harpsichord, or lute.
Third, obviously, is the author.
It is nearly universally attributed to Bach, largely on the preponderance of circumstantial evidence and everything about it.
The earliest known score was pinned by the German composer and organist Johannes Rink.
This transcription is undated, but music historians have pegged it between 1740 and 1760.
Most notably, its title page boldly gives the name of the composer, J.S. Bach.
An obvious question to ask is, why don't we have a copy of the Takata and Fugue written by Bach himself?
Surely he'd have kept it?
Well, much of this has to do with how his estate was handled upon his death.
All of his stuff, including his scores, was divided up all over the place, and much was lost.
The German musicologist Christoph Wolff is generally acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on Bach, and in his 600-page magnum opus, Johann Sebastian Bach, the Learned Musician, he has a whole chapter on Bach's estate and legacy.
He discusses what happened to scores such as this one.
Taking all shares together, the majority of the autograph scores of the instrumental works, including keyboard music, have not survived.
However, Bach's extensive teaching activities opened up important secondary channels of transmission.
Most of the keyboard works were copied by students.
Therefore, very few, if any, keyboard works, especially those composed after 1714, have been lost.
That is not true of the earlier works, which, after about 1710, Bach no longer considered useful as teaching models because he deemed them technically and stylistically outdated.
Typically, many earlier works, such as the Takata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, became accessible only after Bach's death in sources originating after 1750.
It was indeed among his earlier works and is believed to have been composed when he was, hold on to your hats, a teenager, probably in 1702.
So who was this Johannes Rink?
Though a talented composer and organist in his own right, today he's best known for the many important organ piece transcripts like this one that he pinned.
Rink was a student of Johann Peter Kellner, also a composer and organist, who was a close acquaintance of Bach's.
Kellner may have been a student of Bach's, that detail is not proven, but they were fellow organists at the same time and place and definitely well acquainted.
Like Rink, Keller is considered an important figure in the preservation and dissemination of works by his great instructor, through transcription made by his own hand plus those in his group, including Rink.
By any reasonable assessment, it doesn't seem credible that Kellner could have been wrong about the authorship of his friend's own piece, and by extension, neither could have Rink.
Bach absolutely was well aware of Kellner's group's transcriptions.
If this earliest manuscript, from the most authoritative available source, gives the composer as Bach, then why is there controversy over its authorship?
It's not like anyone else has a better source of information.
So there are two points to understand about the doubt over Bach's authorship.
First is that it's a minority view.
Most Bach scholars believe the piece is his.
Second is that the only evidence for any different attribution is stylistic, meaning that when a musicologist listens to the piece, there are any number of aspects of it to which they might say, hmm, that doesn't sound characteristic of Bach.
So just to be clear, there is no solid evidence that the piece was not written by Bach.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Malaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating, skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
The Null Hypothesis Debate 00:05:57
The Takata and Fugue would not be the first organ work to be originally attributed to Bach and later attributed to another composer.
The Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 897, is among the most often cited.
This piece suffered from the same lack of original manuscript from Bach, but it's now been attributed to Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel, a student of Bach's.
Indeed, Dretzel's harpsichord work, Harmonischa Ergotzung, was also attributed to his illustrious teacher for a long time.
Organist and author Jonathan B. Hall is one of the most prominent voices advocating Dretzel as the actual author of the Takata and Fugue.
Hall's argument is built entirely upon style, the details and variety of which I'm not even going to touch upon in this episode.
Hall summarizes his conclusions thus.
We sought a German composer with some Italian blood, strong technique, and a recognizable facile voice, someone from a rhetorical community other than the North German.
We sought someone who composed to a popular, gentlemanly taste.
No fatiguing artifice of counterpoint, please, and arresting cadences are a plus.
We needed someone who is not Bach, early Bach, late Bach, or Bach with a few bits left over.
We needed someone who was a lesser and different composer, and probably younger, possessing an audience, an organ bench of note, and a finished identity in his own right.
The work is neither early nor late.
It is right on the schedule.
Whose schedule is the only question.
Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel fills these criteria remarkably well, and what we possess of his music is cut from the very same cloth as the 565.
I read Hall's work with great care several times.
My ability to draw a conclusion from it was weakened by my own lack of his profound knowledge of the organ, its works, its history, its use in different regions, eras, the differences between the organs themselves, and all that those details tell us.
So I had to grant his position considerable leeway.
Yet I could not get past the fact that the argument is purely subjective.
And to me it was not sufficient to move me to discard Kellner and Rink's attribution to Bach on that seminal manuscript's title page.
Both Kellner and Rink would have been even more familiar with all the points Jonathan Hall raises, and with the additional inside track of having known and worked with Bach personally.
In addition, all three were part of the small community of major organ talents in Germany, a pretty small pond.
Of course, Hall is only one of many who have been advocating alternative views on the Takata and Fugue since at least the 1960s, most notably among them Rolf Dietrich Klaus and Peter Williams.
Among the more intriguing was a computational stylistics analysis done by some computer scientists in 2006.
Using statistical pattern recognition algorithms, they analyzed a number of disputed works by Bach and plotted them where they land on a chart showing the known works of Bach, his eldest son, the composer Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and the composer Johann Ludwig Krebs.
Of the disputed works they analyzed, one clearly landed inside the realm of Krebs, and the rest were all in the realm of Bach himself.
The Takata and Fugue was the exception.
It was outside of Bach's normal style, but still much closer to him than to either of the other two.
Of course, this type of analysis is neither definitive nor comprehensive, and can only compare works and composers it's programmed to compare.
But it was still an interesting result.
Very unusual for Bach, but still closest to Bach, which Wolff always explained by Bach's youth at the time he composed it.
It was, said Wolff, as refreshingly imaginative, varied, and abulliant as it is structurally undisciplined and unmastered.
And we can understand only too well why the self-critical Bach did not use this coup de mon later on for teaching purposes.
It is noteworthy that if anyone wants to do a deep dive on this subject and search for articles written about the Takata and Fugue, there is a tremendous amount available.
And only rarely will you encounter any mention of doubt over its authorship.
It is unquestionably a minority view.
And when you do encounter it, questions like those raised by Hall and others, which are perfectly valid, are dismissed with other answers within the context of Bach's development as a young organ composer, and that do not require us to dispose of Rink's boldly pinned attribution.
Unless someone finds a 1702 copy of the score, signed by the old boy himself, which is not impossible, this is a question that's going to have to remain unanswered.
If you'd like my advice for where you should best come down on this one, I suggest to stick with the null hypothesis unless more evidence turns up showing that it's wrong.
And for now, that null hypothesis is that all is probably as it appears to be.
And the Takata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, was composed by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Join the Skeptoid Discord 00:02:01
A great big skeptoid shout out to premium members Tim Vedder, Eric Davis, but not one of the famous ones, Thomas Okolund, and Barry Coldrick.
Come join in the discussion of this episode in our private Discord channel.
Just visit skeptoid.com slash discord.
And did you know you can have Skeptoid come to you?
I love doing live shows either at meetup clubs, university groups, and conferences.
I can show one of our movies like Science Friction, do a live podcast, or just give one of my popular presentations.
For more information, come to skeptoid.com and click on Live Shows.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrian Hill.
From PRX
Export Selection