by BERKELEY MASON
From The Concert Hall, Broadcasting
House Bach's ' Toccata and Fugue' in D minor was written at Weimar when the composer was still under thirty. It is one of his finest works of this kind, despite the extreme technical difficulty of the fugue. This fugue is known as the ' Dorian ', since the subject is cast in the Dorian mode. A peculiarity of the Toccata is that, contrary to Bach's usual practice of leaving all registration to the discretion of the performer, he has here given indications of the keyboard treatment of the responsive passages that are a feature of the Toccata.
Toccata, as a name given to a composition, means that it represents a ' touch ' piece (from toccare, to touch). This naturally means a showy piece, of a kind, in the case of Bach, that tried the technique of the soloist to the utmost, while retaining dignity and musical value. The name of Toccata is still occasionally given to bravura compositions by modern composers. The well-known one by Debussy is an example-but the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw its rise and fall.
Paul de Maleingreau, Belgian organist and composer, born in 1887, was a pupil of Edgar Tinel at the Brussels Conservatoire and later a professor-before and during a period covering the German occupation of the city. In those years he inaugurated a series of organ recitals in order to make the best organ music popularly known to his fellow citizens and to restore forgotten masterpieces to the repertory. This campaign he successfully continued after the War, one series of recitals having been devoted to the whole of Bach's works for the organ. As a composer he shows himself influenced, next to Bach, by Cesar Franck. He has written both for the pianoforte and the organ.