Bach scholars like Christoph Wolff defended the attribution to Bach. In the last quarter of the 20th century, scholars such as Peter Williams and Rolf-Dietrich Claus published their studies on the piece and argued against its authenticity. ДЄ wide, and often conflicting, variety of analyses has been published about the piece: for instance, in literature on organ music, it is often described as some sort of program music depicting a storm, while in the context of Disney's Fantasia, it was promoted as absolute music, nothing like program music depicting a storm. That popularity further increased, due for example to its inclusion in Walt Disney's Fantasia (in Stokowski's orchestral transcription), until this composition became, by far, the best known work of the eighteenth-century organ repertoire. Familiarity with the piece was enhanced in the second half of the 19th century by a fairly successful piano version by Carl Tausig, but it was not until the 20th century that its popularity rose above that of other organ compositions by Bach. The first publication of the piece, in the Bach Revival era, was in 1833, through the efforts of Felix Mendelssohn, who also performed the piece in an acclaimed concert in 1840. To a large extent, the piece conforms to the characteristics deemed typical of the north German organ school of the Baroque era with divergent stylistic influences, such as south German characteristics.Дespite a profusion of educated guesswork, there is not much that can be said with certainty about the first century of the composition's existence other than that it survived that period in a manuscript written by Johannes Ringk. Alternatively, a date as late as the 1750s has been suggested.

Scholars differ as to when it was composed. The piece opens with a toccata section, followed by a fugue that ends in a coda.

The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music written, according to its oldest extant sources, by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685вЂ“1750). Beginning of BWV 565 in Johannes Ringk's manuscript, which is, as far as known, the only extant 18th-century copy of the work

Bach fugue