In 1981 Peter Williams suggested that Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, despite being one of the most famous pieces in the organ repertoire, might have originally been written for a solo stringed instrument. That sounds strange when the piece is imagined in terms of the sound of a powerful nineteenth- or twentieth-century organ, but as you listen to it, bear in mind that many baroque organs were less powerful than their successors.

Many of the textures are very string-like, and by the time the piece has been shorn of the extra filling which might have been added by an eighteenth-century transcriber, the Toccata and Fugue sounds remarkably like late seventeenth-century German string writing. Various versions have been made for a solo violin, but there is always a problem in that the range is a little to great for four strings, Adding the an extra string to the cello, tuned to D, and but many things work intriguingly well.

There is not enough evidence to prove which instrument the Toccata and Fugue was written for, and the cello version is clearly a transcription. Hopefully it is very close to the transcription which an eighteenth-century cellist might have made, and may be uncannily close to the original version...