Well before the nineteenth century, Luther's hymn Ein feste Burg had become a musical icon, though its import could be disconcertingly different with time and place. By the time of Wagner's jingoistic 1871 Kaisermarsch, for instance, it had become a cipher for Bismarck's Reich. Correspondingly in Busoni's Doktor Faust (1924), a shindy between Catholics and Protestants prompts a Protestant contingent singing Ein feste Burg to goose-step offstage. Its proud Protestant associations had long before been seized upon in the 1836 operatic hit Les Huguenots to become, in France, largely emblematic of Meyerbeer himself. In Offenbach's Ba-Ta-Clan (1855) members of the Chinese court discover, to their mutual surprise, that they are French imposters and harmonize in a homesick paean to Parisian life—"My friends, let us sing as in Les Huguenots with rage and fury! 'Hosanna, I love you, death....'"—and for a giddy moment Ein feste Burg is swept up into the zaniness. Though in solemn earnest when he employed Ein feste Burg in the fugal final movement of his Reformation Symphony (1830), Mendelssohn, despite the work's stormy conception, did not escape a certain slickness that Alkan would probably have identified with a facile abandonment of his Jewish identity with his Lutheran baptism. In the absence of documents—and where there are documents Alkan is reticent about his own productions—all is conjecture. But his preoccupation with Mendelssohn, the vampirism by which Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worte are parodied or acidulously reconceived in Alkan's Chants, strongly suggests that his misleadingly named Impromptu—in fact, his last major work—is struck from the same vein. Nor can one discount Alkan's tacit rivalry with Liszt, whose resplendent 1850 Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" (that is, a fake choral from Meyerbeer's Le Prophète), for organ, as a stimulus, or irritant. Composed for the pedal piano, published by Richault in 1866, and dedicated to his organ teacher Simon Benoist, the Impromptu is, for all its seeming spontaneity, one of the most rigorously organized extended works of the nineteenth century, playing about 15 richly filled minutes. Announced straightforwardly on the pedals, Ein feste Burg becomes ever more strangely fantasticated through a dozen pithy, concise variations—throwing the quirks of the Alkanistic quiddity (charming, flighty, strutting, winsome, bizarre, syncopated, pastoral, etc.) into high relief—before a peremptory gesture brings on the theme as the subject of a stunning, colossal, madcap fugue to crown one of the mightiest variation sets of all time.

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