J.S. Bach - Chromatic Fantasia & Fugue in D minor, BWV 903 (date unknown)

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations as well as for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

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Chromatic Fantasia & Fugue in D minor, BWV 903 (date unknown)

1. Fantasia (0:00)
2. Fugue (6:49)

PETER WATCHORN, pedal harpsichord
(Hubbard & Broekman after Ruckers/Blanchet/Taskin,
1990/after J.A. Hass, 1734)

The Chromatic Fantasia is perhaps Bach’s most celebrated single work
for solo harpsichord, apart from the familiar collections of suites, preludes & fugues. It was singled out early on for special comment:

“I have taken infinite pains to discover another
work of this kind by Bach, but in vain. This
fantasia is unique and never had its like…it
is remarkable that this work, though of such
intricate workmanship, makes an impression
even on the most unpracticed hearer if it is but
performed at all clearly.”

Thus wrote J. N. Forkel in his Bach biography, based on information received from Bach’s sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. This work, its date of composition unknown, came from the collection of W. F. Bach and, in its transmission through Forkel’s biography, became an exemplar for Bach’s “Romantic” style, which defined his image in the early 19th century, especially throughout Germany. It survives in numerous
copies, revealing several stages of development. The Fantasia is extraordinarily daring – even for Bach – with its dramatic use of constantly shifting chromatic harmonies, adjacent placement of enharmonically equivalent notes to effect rapid and unconventional
changes of tonality (A-flat becomes G-sharp at mm. 56 – 57 as an A-flat dominant 7th chord transforms into E major/C-sharp minor!) and brilliant figurations. There has always been the question of how the passages of open-note chords, marked arpeggio, should be interpreted.
In all the copies that survive (there is no definitive autograph), a written-out conventional ascending/descending broken chord is provided, perhaps as a model for what is to come. Schulenberg (1992) has argued
that this settles the question of how the subsequent chords are all to be dealt with, but Isolde Ahlgrimm, in her essay “The Multi-Faceted Arpeggio” (re-published in 2016 with the German edition of my 2007 biography of Ahlgrimm) makes the opposite case: that these sections are where the composer/performer should take over and create something new and radical every time, advice that I have followed with this recording.

It seems that a contemporary performer who was versed in Bach’s style (including Bach) may well have taken these special places as an opportunity to exercise spur-of-the-moment imagination and improvise passages in the spirit of those already provided by Bach elsewhere throughout the piece. The level of the response to these sections may well have constituted an important test of a performer’s on-the-spot compositional skill, an emphasis that is very different from the criteria by which modern pianists (and many harpsichordists) are judged as Bach interpreters. If this is true, then the single conventional, written out
arpeggio represents just the very beginning of a far more involved and sophisticated product.
The Fugue – perhaps not originally associated with the Fantasia, as it is not included in all the sources – is also innovative in various ways, with its ascending chromatic subject, the first seven-note unit of which is immediately repeated a fourth lower; the jazzy tonal “answer” of the second voice in m. 9, and the written-out octaves at the very end – the last
two features unique in Bach’s solo keyboard music. The only real counterpart for the Chromatic Fantasia is the parallel G minor work for organ, BWV 542, which takes the fantasia form towards the outer limits
for rhythmic and harmonic daring. The Chromatic Fantasia appears to have excited the imagination of Bach’s elder sons, and is the direct predecessor of the numerous fantasias for the large five-octave clavichord of the late 18th century by the two composers.
Peter Watchorn