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Technical Notice
| Classical Composer: | Bach, Johann Sebastian |
|---|---|
| Work: | Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 903 |
| Year Composed: | 1723 |
| Instrumentation: | pf |
| Publishers: |
Universal Edition G. Henle Verlag |
| Duration: | 00:12:00 |
| Period: | Baroque (1600-1750) |
| Work Category: | Instrumental |
Work Information
Available Recording(s)
The Chromatic Fantasia is a spectacular example of Johann Sebastian Bach exploring stylus phantasticus. Bach's first biographer Johann Nicolaus Forkel wrote in 1802 that he had searched long and hard to try to find another piece by Bach like it, but never did. Apart from the Fantasia in G minor, BWV 542, for organ the Chromatic Fantasia is a rare example of Bach's interpretation of the free fantasia, a style that would dominate the aesthetic of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel.
Wolfgang Wiemer suggests in his 1988 Bach Jahrbuch article that this piece was written in 1720 as a Tombeau for Bach's first wife Maria Barbara, who died suddenly in that year at the age of 36. Perhaps this explains why such an improvisatory work was so carefully notated and preserved in several copies in the Bach household. In two ways Bach guarantees that the performer dare to be improvisatory when she plays this piece. First, from measures 28 to 48 the score gives carefully written-out figuration alternating with large half-note chords marked "arpeggio", forcing the performer to make choices about how to realise this "short-hand" notation. Then in measure 49 a plaintive melody marked Recitativ begins to alternate with abrupt almost violent short chordal passages, calling the performer to imagine how she can imitate the new character that has suddenly come on stage: a solo voice singing a lamento, accompanied by continuo.
The fugue that follows has a subject built on two ascending minor thirds filled in chromatically. The fugue gets its real rhythmic drive from the counter-subject that begins in measure 8 built from a chain of long-short-short figures known in Bach's time by their rhetorical name: figura corta.
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