The term Spielfiguren was used by Heinrich Besseler (1956) and others to refer to figurations which are performatively idiomatic to a particular musical instrument. Piano toccatas from the 19th-century on often feature specific pianistic figures to generate their motoric character (for example repeated notes), simultaneously shaping the musical substance. With reference to the toccata genre and Alfredo Casella’s Toccata Op. 6, this paper will suggest ways in which signification may be thought to operate from contrasting viewpoints. From the perspective of the skilled pianist, the toccata’s printed page is symbolic of (and the sound in performance indexical to) a particular type of engagement with the keyboard, thus conveying corporeal signification. From the point of view of the work itself, a toccata’s tendency to depend on a single Spielfigur, means that it will be topically limited and will not generally bespeak a narrative structure – “the telling is destined to exceed the tale” (Samson, 2003, p. 84) – but toccatas are often cumulative with executive difficulties and dynamic intensity building as the end approaches, a feature that may be experienced as teleological, providing another, less self-referential, type of signification. From the point of view of both work and performer, toccatas are usually virtuoso pieces which tax the pianist’s playing mechanism, thereby rendering “the instrument an important source of meaning” (84). This provides another area of signification in that the traditional work > performance paradigm is reversed. The presentation ends with a performance of Casella’s Toccata.