“[You] take one of the strictest musical forms, the fugue, which follows rule after rule after rule. You combine it with the fantasia idea and you get a volcano.” This is how Igor Levit describes Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, a dual piece whose parts, though formally dissimilar, unite to create something wholly new.

Describing the first half, the Fantasia, Levit remarks, “This is when you realize that the introduction you’ve just heard was a false promise, as what follows is far from peaceful. It’s highly chromatic...and so free. Basically, it’s annotated improvisation. You have to really grab the bull by its horns from bar one; it’s a landslide of a piano piece.” It’s true; rooted in D minor but free to roam across all 12 notes, the Fantasia gathers itself together just to spill again. With an abandon that Baroque compositions seldom suggest, the Fantasia feels limitless. At the end of the piece, after most chords have been rolled to slam into the next, the sudden, doleful descent in the bass line leaves a chill.

Unlike fantasies, fugues have a formal rigidity—a theme is announced and iterated in a contrapuntal manner. One voice begins with its call and the responders trickle in. It’s a nice way to think of it, but what if the voices are yelling across the table at a dinner party, already having forgotten the query? Might a fugue be call-and-call-and-call? The D minor ditty affirms.

Taken together, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue might be a predecessor to Beethoven’s Romanticism or Chopin’s play with time; but, in its audacity and explosiveness, it’s more closely related to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” or Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. —Tess Carges