Bach Toccata in D minor, BWV 913 (Richter) [live]; Bach: Toccata in C minor: BWV 911 (Martha Argerich) | Score video; J. S. Bach - Toccata BMW 916 for Clavier in G Major (Gould, Gillham)

Spencer Cha - Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. [Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_...] "Virtuoso, inventive and moving, but also capricious to the point of recklessness. This is how you could describe this work by Bach, which may be his earliest toccata for harpsichord. Although no autograph has survived, the work must have been composed shortly after Bach’s return from a journey to Lübeck. He had heard the famous Buxtehude playing there and was so impressed that he stayed longer than the couple of weeks’ leave his employer had given him. So on his return at the beginning of 1706, he got a severe reprimand from the church council in Arnstadt. Bach had to face a whole tirade of

J.S. Bach was but a year shy of his 30th birthday when he completed his ambitious C-minor Toccata, yet the work would remain unpublished for another 125 years. Among his early works, it was not uncommon for pieces to go unpublished or vanish altogether. The C-minor Toccata owes a great deal to Bach’s youthful idol, Johann Buxtehude, the organist-composer synonymous with the Northern-German style of Baroque organ composition and performance. (In such high esteem did Bach hold the older composer that nearly a decade earlier, in 1705, he set out on foot for Lübeck, some 300 miles from his native Arnstadt, to hear the 68-year-old master perform at the organ). Bach’s Toccata makes much of the contrasts between free, improvisatory-sounding music and more tightly organized, contrapuntal sections.

Johann Sebastian Bach - Toccata in G Major, BWV 916 Performed by: Glenn Gould: https://youtu.be/Vyk1zlL2XyM Jayson Gillham: https://youtu.be/vPG1HlJ1_UE The toccata as a genre originated in Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was an improvisatory, often virtuosic piece in so-called stylus phantasticus that consisted of multiple sections sharply contrasting in tempo, dynamics and texture. The seven clavier toccatas have a special place in Bach’s repertory because they were not composed as a requirement for any of his duties. What instrument they were originally intended for remains continuous source of discussion, both organ and harpsichord are considered options. They represent a synthesis of Italian, French and German style and are based upon the seventeenth century toccatas