Att övertyga från orgelpallen – En retorisk studie av BWV 565

Sammanfattning

I have often been told that composers from the baroque era used the models of classical rhetoric while they composed music. The question for this lecture recital has thus been to find out what this connection between rhetoric and music looks like, as well as to investigate which of the rhetorical models I, as an organist, could use in order to understand how Bach composed his music. Bach's toccata and fugue in D minor, BWV 565, have been analysed to shed light on this connection. Through a hermeneutic and neo-aristotelian approach together with the classical rhetoric's speech structure and the models of figures of speech have been used to provide a deeper understanding of Bach's well-known work. In summary, the investigation shows me that much of the expression in BWV 565 can be understood through a rhetorical perspective, both in terms of figures of speech, and from a speech structure perspective