Classical Music | Music for Harpsichord

Recorded on 06/15/1994, uploaded on 02/12/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

The Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 probably belongs to the years Bach spent in C'then (1717-1722). Here the listener is presented with a work that is wholly German and of a style already well-known and venerated in Bach's lifetime. The later epithet, "chromatic," probably reflects both the far-ranging modulations of the extravagant Fantasy and the obvious nature of the Fugue's subject. The impovisatory character of the Fantasy comes from a long tradition of pieces composed in the stylus phantasticus, a genre in which the musician can demonstrate uninhibited invention. In his Musurgia universalis of 1650, the German composer and theorist Athanasius Kircher, offers an excellent definition of this style:

The fantastic style is suitable for instruments. It is the most free and unrestrained method of composing; it is bound to nothing, neither to words nor to a melodic subject; it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues; it is divided into those pieces that are commonly called fantasias, ricercatas, toccatas, sonatas.

From the outset, the Fantasy proves a bravura piece of truly marvelous invention. The brilliance of the instrument itself is evident in every phrase: the piece abounds in arpeggios and fast scales, and even includes a section marked "Recitativ." The Fugue, while rather more strict, is still propelled more by virtuosity than by contrapuntal devices. To both listener and performer, this work, probably more than any other, suggests Bach in a flight of improvised inspiration.

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