Hi Claudio,

> Am 11.01.2017 um 17:28 schrieb J. Claudio Di Veroli <[log in to unmask]>:
> 
>> Ibo wrote: Interesting also that the Fugue in a (BVW 865) from WTC 1
>> requires a pedal or a third hand at least in the three last bars: The organ
>> point of four and a half bars (does that say something about the tempo?) can
>> neither be held nor can the note be struck again by just one player in order
>> to sound through the final bar.
> 
> Indeed. I find this concrete evidence that the piece was meant for an organ
> with pedals.

I actually don’t see how that would be evidence for an assumption of repertoire playing on an organ. 
1722 and before there is no reason to assume that such a piece  was actually aimed for specific performance on an organ or that there had been any performance.
Do you have any confirmed examples of a performances of certain pieces on (a certain) organ before ca. 1740 in the North and Central German practice of organ playing? I have never encountered one single example – over a time range of two or three centuries before Bach. That is corroborated  by the evidence from several (and well-known) sources, that declare playing composed "organ pieces” on an organ for utterly unprofessional. I have published on this topic before. Evidence has been piling up quickly since I first went public  with the thought in 2003. Siegbert Rampe came parallel to very similar conclusion (published in the Schütz-Jahrbuch 2003, 2004, and 2005).
For a thorough survey of the topic of keyboard playing in Germany see Siegbert Rampe’s rather new book Orgel- und Clavierspielen. Eine deutsche Sozialgeschichte im europäischen Kontext 1400-1800 (Munich: Katzbichler, 2014) – I can agree with most what he presents and concludes.


> AFAIK in Bach's time they did not feel our modern need to
> adhere to the score faithfully: if pedals were not available, the player
> would just play the pedal note one octave higher, for example.

Sure, that could have been done. 
There was however a the convention of binding long notes together, in "organ point-like” structures, that were probably  

And I think that the piece (BWV 865) in question can be played by one player alone without loosing much: One could for example strike the full chord in the beginning of m. 86 again. Since the whole note a° is played in the final bar, there will be enough support (and resonance) to keep the low A until a final arpeggiated chor.d  

> The modern organist finds it strange to ask for a pedalboard and then score
> for it just a few notes, but IMHO this may just mean that the work was meant
> for a very-small-range pedalboard, such as the traditional
> one-octave-short-octave one playing only the notes C-D-E-F-G-A-Bb-B-c. This
> was the standard Italian pedalboard for centuries: possibly it was also
> found in small Southern German organs (of which not many survive AFAIK).
> Even a few large scale organ works (such as the Fuga on the Magnificat BWV
> 733 and the Pastorale BWV 590) use this restricted pedal range.

That kind of rather short pedal boards existed in Germany, as you say, in the south. A huge like the Gabler-organ (1737-1750) in Weingarten got a pedal compass C-g°.
The southern organ building tradition is, however, not relevant for Bach and I think one should be more than cautious to reconstruct an organ from repertoire in a time, when there was no organ repertoire (a time and area in which complex contrapuntal improvisation was the professional organist’s benchmark). 
For the central and northern territories, the tendency was "big is beautiful” concerning pedal compasses, and not so seldom the organs, too.

Best

Ibo 


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