JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH’S TOCCATA AND FUGUE IN d MINOR

“Our object is to reach the very people who have walked out on this Toccata and Fugue because they didn’t understand it. I am one of those people,” confessed Walt Disney, “but when I understand it, I like it.”[1]

Originally, it was planned that an overture would open the film. Instead after much deliberation Disney decided to proceed with earlier investigations by his Effects Department regarding the potential for animated abstractions correlated to music. In 1928 Walt had seen a demonstration of the “color organ”, a keyboard that “plays” colors onto a screen. Stokowski himself was familiar with this instrument as it had been deployed in an experimental concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra under his direction.

A German pioneer in animated abstraction on film Oskar Fischinger (1900-1957) had requested the right to use the maestro’s orchestration of J.S. Bach’s (1685-1750) Toccata and Fugue in d minor for one of his abstract cinematic projects. Though Stokowski declined, the correlation must have stuck in his head and then in Disney’s too. To shepherd this segment, Walt assigned Cy Young, head of his Effects Department. Fischinger later joined the staff as well, but finding himself prevented from exercising total artistic control as in his previous solo efforts he quit after nine months’ labor.

As the formulaic title suggests, a toccata and fugue is a two-part composition. The form reached its apogee in the many such works by J.S. Bach written in the late Seventeenth/early Eighteenth Century. This one is among the most widely recognized pieces for organ partly because of its inclusion in Fantasia, partly also because it has become associated with horror and villainy as background music for such films as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)and The Black Cat (1934) as well as in later movies like The Phantom of the Opera (1962) and Disney’s own 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). More often Bach composed preludes to precede his fugues. A toccata differs in that it is usually more virtuoso and maintains a freeform improvisational feeling. This one in d minor is more stately than many.

In contrast, a fugue is an intricate form with strict rules. It is a contrapuntal structure rather than polyphonic – that is, its impetus is horizontal rather than vertical: the same musical theme overlaps itself at specific intervals in four “voices” (think soprano, alto, tenor, bass) instead of a melody in a single voice supported by blocks of chords under it. It is similar to a canon or round, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but vastly more complex. Bach’s awesome mastery of this form, which is the basis for many many of his great masterpieces, is clearly demonstrated in his very last (and unfinished) composition The Art of the Fugue (1750), in which he uses a single theme throughout to demonstrate every possible fugal structure from the simplest 4-voiced contrapunctus through some in which the theme, for example, is contrasted with itself played upside-down and/or backwards! The work concludes with a 4-voiced triple fugue, in which three different themes combine in various configurations all at the same time. (This last fugue was intended to be a quadruple one, but Bach died before he could add that fourth and final theme. At that point in this composition the music is blithely wending its complicated way to a grand finale then simply peters out and stops abruptly, one of the most starkly poignant illustrations of the finality of Death I know of!)

Casually the members of Fantasia’s orchestra assemble, seat themselves and begin tuning their instruments, now and then playing familiar snippets of the great music to follow.

“The opening scene, where the orchestra is being assembled was projected on the stage main curtain with house lights still on and most of the audience didn’t realize that the film had started. I heard someone say, ‘I think the picture’s started’ and his companion said, ‘No, that’s just the orchestra filing in’. They thought it was a real orchestra! What a wonderful, sneaky way to begin the picture.”[2]

Their preparations occasionally seem to cause their instruments to brighten with glowing color. These musicians are not members of Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra, the ones who actually recorded the soundtrack. Instead they are local Los Angeles instrumentalists and some of them, studio staff. Union and budgetary considerations prevented hiring the Philadelphia players from appearing in this segment or in the “interstitials” between the film’s other segments. Finally, two formally-dressed women ascend through the ranks to a pinnacle (the first of several such) where they seat themselves beside twin immense magnificent golden harps and we are all set to go…

Master of ceremonies Deems Taylor now steps into view above the center of the orchestra, rather stiff and formal, tuxed and authoritative – as well he was, being a successful composer himself and well-known intermission commentator for the New York Philharmonic’s national radio broadcasts.

Stokowski debuted his orchestrated version of Bach’s organ piece in 1927. In Fantasia, emcee Taylor introduces it as an example of “absolute” music, that is, devoid of any “program” or extra-musical significance. The film’s other seven compositions are ballets, tone poems, a sacred hymn or, in the case of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, “programmatic”, that is, all refer to a story or images that the music intends to illustrate aurally. But not this first one…

During Bach’s toccata, Disney retains Oskar Fischinger’s suggestion to show Stokowski conducting, but expands upon it to reveal the orchestra actually playing the music.

The first few parts of the piece are played in each of the three sound channels (first left, then right, then the middle, then all of them) as a demonstration of Fantasound.[3]

As the toccata proceeds, colors are projected onto various instruments and behind the players and then the musicians themselves or their shadows start getting superimposed over each other. Repeatedly, Stokowski’s conducting summons blooms of intense color which cast him into silhouette. During the toccata’s final sonorous cadence, his silhouette dissolves into the color and the fugue begins.

Fischinger intended to choreograph only abstractions in time with the music, mostly variously-colored geometric forms. “Too dinky,” was Walt’s critique. Instead the segment mixes abstract images with recognizable shapes such as violin bows and sometimes displays others against backgrounds representing sky. I would categorize this as surrealism rather than abstraction, say a la Salvadore Dalí (1904-1989) with whom Disney later collaborated on an animated featurette Destino (begun in 1945, finished and released in 2003). With some of its images, this Toccata and Fugue vaguely presages the arc of the entire movie: the animation intimates effects or motifs we will see later such as the twinkling fairydust in the Nutcracker segment or the volcanic spewings and the mating of single-celled organisms during The Rite of Spring. In this segment’s final images Stokowski’s conducting rouses flares of crystallized color like the waves Mickey “conducts” during his dream in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or the firey plumes Chernabog summons atop Bald Mountain or the cathedral-like spires formed by trees during the Ave Maria, the movie’s penultimate image.

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[1] Culhane, John: op. cit., p. 36.

[2] Hench, John, as quoted in Korkis, Jim: “What Was Fantasound?”, mouseplanet.com

[3] www.disney.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasia