One Traveler

It’s finally arrived, after a long wait. The package was on the floor in the main hallway. On it was a big red warning: VORSICHT! NOTEN! NICHT WERFEN!

That’s German (using cognates) for “Foresight! Notes! Not To Warp!”

Or simply “Warning: musical score. Please don’t bend.”

It was my long-expected copy of the facsimile of BWV565, the toccata and fugue in D minor by C. H. Dretzel (I think). Published by Verlag Dohr, or Dohr Press in plain English.

It’s a beautiful job, in the exact size and dimensions of the original—tall and slender. Hard-bound, and in a lovely slipcase. Too tall for my bookshelves. The pages of the ms. are in lovely, authentic sepia tones. The back page’s many splatters and stains are lovingly reproduced, almost like the Shroud of Turin.

The cover page is so amusing. It’s the work of a teenage copyist, Johannes Ringk, and is full of the arcane and archaicized preciousness for which he was noted. The writing is full of curlicues and diddly-doos. (This includes a notable skip of the pen just above “Fuga.” The tiny splatters of ink and the “repairs” to the sweeping ornamental line are all too obvious. Rattled and piqued, the boy returned to the word FUGA but slipped from italic to Fraktur hand for the -GA.)

Then there’s his deliciously arrogant young signature: obviously contemporaneous with the rest of the page, obviously the same hand, and also obviously attempting to look, say, two and a half centuries older than the rest of the page. This bright spark had been studying old books and papers, no doubt about it. Lots of ‘em. All at once.

The title page is full of other errors: instead of saying “D moll,” or “d minor,” the key is called “ex D#” —which means “out of D sharp.” Perhaps they used “ex” in Germany to mean “in,” but it strikes me as preciousness. Sharp is just wrong.

Then there’s the composer’s name, “J. Se. Bach.” This is also probably an error. This is the only source we have, whatsoever, that attributes the work to J. S. Bach. It’s also the oldest, thus the closest artifact to the work. By itself—and this ms. is definitely by itself—this is not enough to establish authorship.

I have already written on the clear stylistic link to Dretzel’s work, and the utter, complete, gaping-wide-open lack of any potential link to the style of Bach himself.

The facsimile has a wonderful commentary section, in German, English, and French, in that order. Written by Rolf-Dietrich Claus, whose book-length study of this piece is so fundamentally important (and dang it, still not translated, leaving me to fumfer through with my haphazard German).

Yet the commentary keeps circling, almost coyly, around Johann Peter Kellner. Musicologists will keep trying to pin this piece on him, simply and solely because “he’s more famous already.” This is an intellectual failure, and a minor act of idolatry. To his credit, though, Claus doesn’t push this point too hard.

Most fruitful in all the commentary is the distinction among different methods of noting accidentals. It’s of limited usefulness in the 565 debate, at least vis-à-vis Dretzel, as his Divertimento is engraved at a later date using the “piano-lesson rule” (Klavierstunden-Regel).

I wonder, however, if this avenue of thought might shed light on the exceedingly improbable German-sixth harmony in the fantasia in g minor. I find the e-flat there unlikely to the point of unplayability: indeed, I have normally ignored it—at my own peril, I realize. Is there a heuristic here that might prove me right, or wrong?

It is the final sentence of the commentary that inspires me the most: the search for the true creator…has now begun.

Amen. So it has. And I have something to say about it.

Kudos to Verlag Dohr and Dr. Claus.

The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV565, was composed by Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel of Nuremberg.

I think.