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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD
This is an extraordinary and demanding survey of the great modern and Baroque classics of the violin repertoire. The program itself demands immense stamina, technique, and imagination. It is a very large picture window into the exhaustive brilliance of the great repository of civilization epitomized by the accumulated genius of works like these. It takes an exhilarated madness to plan a concert as monumental as this. It is like having Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière, and Einstein at dinner together.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 (arr. for violin solo)
Like the great Bach Chaconne for solo violin (the last movement of Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin), this immense and legendary work is also in D minor. It was originally written for the organ. When I was a 13-year-old organist at my local church, I used to play it. It was the theme of the Lon Chaney film The Phantom of the Opera, and so I would lurch around the keyboards trying to imitate Chaney. The audience would always gasp. The priests told me that Bach wasn’t allowed in church. But my grandfather had built the church, so they were stuck with me (and Bach). But I was the last unpaid organist they ever had. Bach is fortunately allowed at Tippet Rise.
I also used to play the Busch-Reisinger organ at Harvard, made by the Dutch company Flentrop in 1957 at the behest of the great organist E. Power Biggs, a replica
of the Baroque organ which Bach used to play at the Thomas-kirche in Leipzig from 1723 until his death in 1750. He is buried there. His organ no longer exists, and has been replaced twice.
The Flentrop is a tracker organ, where the keys connect directly to the pipes, so the fingers on the keys open the pipes and allow the wind from the bellows to flow into them, thus creating the sound. It has around 61 stops, or special sounds, so these were the voices Bach had at his disposal for this piece.
When the inventor of the Ampico piano roll asked Schnabel to record on it, he asked how many touches it had. “Eleven,” said the inventor proudly.
“Too bad,” said Schnabel. “I have twelve.” And he put off making a piano roll. Schnabel said, “Great music is better than it can be played.” I would add that every time you listen to a great piece, it’s always different.
Bach’s Toccata is based on the world’s most famous mordent, specifically a lower mordent, where you play the note that’s written, the note below it, and then the note on which you started. In this case, Bach wrote an A, so you play A-G-A. The tradition is to play it slowly, not rapidly, so it sounds quite threatening. The notes that follow the mordent are almost inconsequential. You could call them an expanded mordent, where you have a quick scale down to the note below D, and then the figure ends on D. So it’s the same thing as the opening, but extended.
This Toccata is simply a bunch of tricks around the notes of A and D, in the key of D minor, where A and D are two of the three notes in the D-minor triad.
The whole point of this bravura introduction is just to shout D! It’s in D minor! The fugue then sneaks in afterwards, with its trembling message, a simple wavering theme using A as a constantly repeating note in between the melody.
On an organ, this can be varied endlessly by changing the timbres, or the stops. You can start as a flute, then play it as an oboe, then come in with the bourdon in the deep pedaled bass, and so on. Even the piano (in the Busoni transcription) has more possible tricks to keep it interesting.
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The Music at Tippet Rise