It is one thing to love a pipe organ, but to be buried under one is another thing. Yet that is exactly what Josef Anton Bruckner did. He designed his own sarcophagus and had himself placed under his favorite organ in Saint Florian Monastery in Austria.
In October 1926, just a month before his death, Aloÿs Claussmann chatted with an old friend, Claude Nievre, a writer for La Montagne, a newspaper whose office was directly below the apartment where Claussmann lay dying.
Much has been written about Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, and it seems that everything has been said. The work is considered an outstanding example of stylus phantasticus, a style of composition that encourages rhythmic and harmonic freedom. Effects play a greater role than contrapuntal substance, and in this respect BWV 565 has always been admired.
