toccata

Toccata derives from the Italian toccare, to touch — the same verb that gives English 'touch' via Old French toucher, and that survives in Italian to mean the physical act of touching something as well as, colloquially, to concern or affect someone. In musical terminology, a toccata (literally, a 'touched thing,' a 'touch-piece') is a keyboard composition designed to demonstrate the performer's technical agility and the instrument's capabilities through rapid passage-work, scales, arpeggios, and often sections of sustained counterpoint — all unified less by formal structure than by the exhilarating feeling of a keyboard being fully explored. The word first appears in Italian musical sources in the late sixteenth century.

The earliest toccatas in the historical record were written for the harpsichord, clavichord, and organ by composers working in Italy in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. Claudio Merulo (1533–1604), a Venetian organist, is credited with writing some of the first recognizable toccatas — pieces that alternate between free, improvisatory sections and more formally structured fugal passages. The form was extended and deepened by Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643), who was organist at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and whose toccatas — published in 1615 and 1627 — are among the most sophisticated keyboard compositions of the seventeenth century. Frescobaldi's toccatas are said to have attracted crowds of listeners to St. Peter's even during Mass: the contemporary composer Michel de Montéclair claimed ten thousand people came to hear him play.

The form passed from Italian to German composers with particular intensity. Johann Jakob Froberger (1616–1667), who studied with Frescobaldi in Rome, brought the Italian toccata style to the German courts and influenced an entire generation of German keyboard composers. The tradition culminated in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), whose organ toccatas — especially the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565, though its attribution to Bach has been debated) — are among the most famous keyboard works in existence. Bach's D minor Toccata opens with a single gestural sweep, a descending pedal line and a massive chord, before breaking into the free passage-work that is the form's essential character. Its opening notes are perhaps the most recognizable in the organ repertoire.

The toccata continued to be written through the Romantic and modern periods. Robert Schumann wrote a brilliant concert toccata for piano (1833); Sergei Prokofiev's Toccata, Op. 11 (1912) is a showpiece of percussive, mechanical energy; Aram Khachaturian's Toccata (1932) is a staple of the student piano repertoire. The form's freedom — its relative lack of strict formal constraints compared to the fugue or sonata — made it useful for composers who wanted to write virtuosic, improvisatory-feeling music without committing to a preexisting structure. The word entered English from Italian, and its Italian form has never been replaced.