Passacaglia und Fuge für großes Orchester und Orgel Op.27 was completed in October 1917 and was dedicated to Carl Hagemann, who directed Sekles’s opera Scheherazade in Mannheim. It was premiered on 13 January 1922, at a concert of the Frankfurt Museum Society under the direction of Wilhelm Furtwängler, along with Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.2 and Richard Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica (Tschiedel: 54). Other performances soon followed: later in the same year in Bremen, at a concert of the Philharmonic Society, and another in December 1922, during the Deutsche Musikwoche in Munich. Early criticism praised the composition’s “skilful handling of themes and motives” (Musical America), while Karl Westermeyer deemed Passacaglia und Fuge Op.27 a work of great significance (Tschiedel: 55).
