aining even the minor details of what in other hands had long before
become its conventional form; but the one thing he did not do was to abuse
it according to time-honoured custom as the staple form for opera. For that
he had too much dramatic insight. His treatment of other important
art-forms is illustrated in the articles on CONTRAPUNTAL FORMS; CONCERTO
and INSTRUMENTATION. Here we may attempt to illustrate his methods by such
forms and characteristics as cannot be classified under those headings.

[Sidenote: Illustrations of Bach's method.]

1. The toccatas of Buxtehude and his predecessors show how an effective
musical scheme may be suggested by running over the keyboard of an organ as
if to try (_toccare_) the touch, then bursting out into sustained and full
harmony, and at last settling down to a fugue. But before Bach no one
seemed able to keep the fugue in motion long enough to make a convincing
climax. Very soon it collapsed and the process of quasi-extemporization
began again, to culminate in a new fugue which often gave the whole work a
happy but deceptive suggestion of organic unity by being founded on an
ingenious variation of the subject of the first fugue. But in Bach's hands
the toccata becomes one of the noblest and most plastic of forms. The
introductory runs may be disjointed and exaggerated to grotesqueness, until
the gaps between them gradually fill out, and they build themselves up into
grand piles of musical architecture, as in the organ toccata in C; or they
may be worked out on an enormous scale in long and smooth canonic passages
with a definite theme, as in the greatest of all toccatas, that in F for
organ, which is most artistically followed by a fugue unusually quiet for
its size. In one instance, the toccata at the beginning of the E minor
clavier-partita, the introductory runs, though retaining much of the
extempore character from which the form derives its name, take shape in a
highly organized and rounded-off group of contrasted themes. The fugue
follows without change of time, and is developed in so leisurely a manner
that it is fully as long as a normal fugue on a large scale by the time it
reaches what sounds like its central episode. At this point some of the
introductory matter quietly enters, and leads to a recapitulation of the
whole introduction in the key now reached. The obvious sequel would be a
counter-development of the fugue, at least as long as what has gone before,
as in