142: Monster Toccata in F, BWV 540

About four years ago I made an episode about Bach’s ‘longest’ piece:

Somehow I missed a piece which should definitely be in contention for his ‘longest.’ At 437 measures, the Toccata in F, BWV 540, is (I think!) the longest stretch of Bach’s music, in terms of measures. It probably also holds the record for longest single note. Take a look at page one— an inanimate object could play the pedal part on page one:

From easiest pedal page, to tap-dancing nightmare, the feet on the very next page:

…and all that happens twice. What a piece! Over 170 measures of pedal drones and pedal ballet before this piece finally gets modulating. An arpeggio motif (what I call the spiral in the episode) gets passed through each voice, high to low:

These arpeggios occur in all major keys but one, and many minor keys. How’s this for tonally exhaustive?

Bach eludes the expectations of the listener three times in stunning deceptive cadences, after which, the B-A-C-H motif appears (in transposition) in the pedals:

If you play this piece, you’ll face the issue of whether or not to play the high D. The organs lacked this high D, but did Bach want this effect anyhow?

Ullrich Böhme’s excellent rendition (with fugue!)

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Transcript:

Thanks for listening. Thank you for tuning in. I think you’ll be blown away by today’s piece, perhaps the longest piece. What is Bach’s Longest Piece and His Shortest? Probably not, but what I was really After was the longest uninterrupted stretch of music. So it seems like you could count that in two ways. The longest amount of measures or the longest amount of beats. And as I found going through the entire oeuvre or trying to count every single... There are a half dozen pieces that contain over 400 measures, and that’s massive, massive in terms of measures or bars, but all of these pieces are in the quick meter of 3.8. So if it’s actually pulses we’re after, then you see any piece that’s in 4.4 has more than twice the amount of beats than a piece in 3.8. So I don’t understand how to count this. This whole exercise became very superfluous and probably not very meaningful, but I did forget. Somehow I missed this one piece, today’s piece, this Toccata, that actually does, I think, I think unless I’m missing another one, this actually does have the most measures in any piece of Bach. It is 437 bars long. That’s a full 10 bars longer than the previous record holder, the piece that I thought had the most measures in that episode from 2022. But this piece, this Toccata, also holds some very interesting... This has the longest pedal point, I believe, the longest single sustained note in all of Bach’s music. If you look at the first page, I will show the image in the Substack description, you’ll see the first This page is nothing but a giant pedal point. Your left foot is stuck down to this pedal note, holding a note for 54 measures. That’s longer than most pieces, 54 measures. And here you are just holding one note. If you play the piano, for example, if you’re not comfortable playing with your feet on the organ, but if you do want... To feel the experience of playing one and a half pages of Bach’s organ music with not much trouble, start here. Your left foot just simply holds one note for one and a half pages. So this is the Toccata in F Major, BWV 540. It belongs to a Toccata in Fugue. We’ll do the Toccata today, the Fugue later. But here I want to zoom out. I tried to make this episode last week. I don’t know, I was working half the day and it just sort of fell apart. I try my best to be like a storyteller with Bach and for some reason my narrative was off. It just sounded like I was saying and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens. E