Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor stands as a landmark among his compositions for clavier solo. Although it exists in numerous copied sources, the autograph is lost, giving rise to considerable variation from one version to another. While Bach himself might have been responsible for some of the changes and alterations, this work has been reassembled from source scores once owned and/or copied by C. P. E. Bach, J. G. Müthel, J. C. Kittel, and others.

A unique challenge in the performance of the fantasia can be found in the extended arpeggiated passages, notated by half and quarter note chords. While not unusual in the body of Baroque keyboard literature, such notation requires careful thought in terms of its realization at the keyboard. The present edition for organ offers a detailed and specific reconstruction of all improvisatorial sections, as well as adding similar detailed suggestions for other arpeggiated chords throughout the fantasia, and at the conclusion of the fugue. The few ornaments that have been added can be identified as being variants of the predominant source symbol, ‘tr.’

A pedal part has been included, but it is applied sparingly to provide bass notes for certain chordal progressions, as well as throughout the arpeggiated passagework of the fantasia. Its use in the fugue is conservative, with the resulting effect that the inherently keyboard-oriented nature of the composition is retained, in strong contrast to Bach’s traditional idiomatic approach to writing for organ solo.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the fantasia and fugue lies in its remarkably chromatic harmonic language, not only in the modulatory passages of the fantasia, but in the actual pitches of the fugue subject as well. Also unusual is the section of the fantasia marked ‘Recitativ,’ evocative as it is of some of the more somber and angst-laden portions of numerous of his cantatas and settings of the Passion of the Lord.