Misleading title – the jury is still out on who wrote Dracula‘s favorite Halloween piece, the Toccata and Fugue in d minor by Johann Sebastian Bach. An amazing amount of research has been done trying to solve the great mystery of its composer.

To sum up the debate:

• The work’s style is … strange. The toccata is very free-form, similar to the earliest immature works of the young master, and nothing at all like his mature works. The fugue is in four voices, but most of the time, only three sound (uncharacteristic of Bach.) It plays more like a violin piece than an organ work.
• The earliest copy of this piece was written around 1740, by an unimportant organist named Ringk. (Most music at this time was copied by hand, so it’s not so strange that a work by Bach would have been hand-copied by another musician.) People have deeply studied Ringk’s handwriting in order to pin down the approximate date of this single copy.
• It would be possible that Bach wrote the piece as a young man, and Ringk copied it when Bach was old, but then the question is, why did he choose this piece to copy? Why not something else, something better?
• Could Bach have copied this piece into his own library, only to have Ringk later copy it from him, falsely attributing the work to the great master?

Whatever the history, and whoever wrote it, this work has become Halloween staple. A gothic organ sound playing its twisted, dark harmony can chill your soul; the opening motif catches your attention immediately. No wonder hearing this piece brings up images of Dracula, or maybe the Phantom of the Opera. Its appeal has helped it overcome its compositional flaws; it has been arranged for all sorts of solo instruments (most famously for piano, but also violin and guitar) and ensembles (most famously for orchestra, but also saxophone choir (because, why not)).