ABSTRACT
Th e seven manualiter toccatas mark the culmination of Bach’s early work for keyboard instruments without pedals. Th ey also form the earliest group of “clavier” pieces now known by a collective title, but unlike the English Suites, WTC, and various other collections they do not appear to have been organized into a set by Bach himself. Th eir tonalities do not fall into any obvious pattern, although the predominance of minor over major keys-only two of the latter-is an oldfashioned trait shared with the English Suites. Although they were distributed more widely than the pieces considered in previous chapters, the toccatas tended to be copied on an individual basis, and not by Bach’s Leipzig pupils, implying that Bach did not use them for teaching. Probably their older style had made them unfashionable by the time Bach left Weimar, but they were again attractive aft er his death as manualiter parallels to his great organ praeludia. Th is may explain why, apart from copies deriving from Bach’s Weimar pupils and associates, most sources are later.
