Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565

Every haunted house, every vampire movie, every Halloween playlist for the last century — those opening notes belong to Bach, who was not trying to be spooky. He was trying to show off. The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was almost certainly written when Bach was in his early twenties, recently appointed as organist at the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt, and absolutely determined to prove that he was the most technically gifted keyboard player in Germany. He was right, but his employers weren't thrilled about it. The church council formally reprimanded him for making the hymn accompaniments too elaborate. The congregation couldn't follow along. Bach was essentially fired for being too good.

Here's a controversy that musicologists have been fighting about for decades: Bach might not have written this piece at all. The argument, first advanced in the 1980s, holds that the Toccata and Fugue is stylistically unlike Bach's other organ works — it's more virtuosic display than structural depth, more flash than substance by Bach's standards. Some scholars attribute it to a student or contemporary. Others counter that it's early Bach, written before he developed his mature style, and that expecting a twenty-three-year-old to write like a forty-year-old is absurd. The debate continues, and honestly, it doesn't matter. Whoever wrote it created the most recognizable organ piece in existence.

The connection to horror came from Disney, of all places. When Leopold Stokowski included an orchestral arrangement of the Toccata in the 1940 film Fantasia, paired with demonic imagery and abstract animation, the piece's reputation shifted permanently from 'impressive church music' to 'the soundtrack of darkness.' Bach, a devout Lutheran who wrote 'S.D.G.' — Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone the glory — at the bottom of his manuscripts, became the house composer for Hollywood evil. He would have been mortified.

Bach fathered twenty children with two wives, held a series of increasingly prestigious church positions, went blind in his final years from botched eye surgery, and died in 1750 with an estate that included five harpsichords, a lute, and no indication that anyone would remember his name a century later. The St. Matthew Passion was used as wrapping paper. Mendelssohn revived his reputation in 1829. You're welcome.