I should have also added Mendelssohn to the list here. He loved playing JS Bach both on the violin and the piano, and edited a book of organ toccatas and fugues that is (suspiciously) the first known edition of the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (the one that all the movie villains like).
Personally, I suspect that Mendelssohn himself wrote the Toccata and Fugue in D minor based on a few fragments from Bach (particularly the subject of the fugue), and as a tribute to Bach. The Toccata is not really in JS Bach's style at all, making several harmonic choices that Bach makes in no other work - although I think the people who suggest that Bach himself wrote that piece would argue that it was likely a transcription of an improvised work, where the counterpoint could be a little less perfect.
>The composition has been deemed both "particularly suited to the organ"[14] and "strikingly unorganistic".[28] It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought,[29] but also as containing "passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea".[14] It has been called "entirely a thing of virtuosity"[30] yet also described as being "not so difficult as it sounds".[21] It has been described as some sort of program music depicting a storm,[30] but also as abstract music, quite the opposite of program music depicting a storm.[31] It has been presented as an emanation of the galant style, yet too dramatic to be anything near that style.[22] Its period of origin has been assumed to have been as early as around 1704,[32] and as late as the 1750s.[10] Its defining characteristics have been associated with extant compositions by Bach (BWV 531, 549a, 578, 911, 914, 922 and several of the solo violin sonatas and partitas),[10][14][33][34][35] and by others (including Nicolaus Bruhns and Johann Heinrich Buttstett),[10] as well as with untraceable earlier versions for other instruments and/or by other composers.[10] It has been deemed too simplistic for it to have been written down by Bach,[10] and too much a stroke of genius to have been composed by anyone else but Bach.[36]
So much for consistency in writers. I think the message is that it is going to influence every listener in its own way, possibly informed by the preconceived notions of that listener.
Personally, I suspect that Mendelssohn himself wrote the Toccata and Fugue in D minor based on a few fragments from Bach (particularly the subject of the fugue), and as a tribute to Bach. The Toccata is not really in JS Bach's style at all, making several harmonic choices that Bach makes in no other work - although I think the people who suggest that Bach himself wrote that piece would argue that it was likely a transcription of an improvised work, where the counterpoint could be a little less perfect.