DIETRICH BUXTEHUDE Dietrich Buxtehude lived his entire life close to the shores of the Baltic Sea. He was most likely born in 1637 in the Danish town of...
DIETRICH
BUXTEHUDE
Dietrich
Buxtehude lived his entire life close to the shores of the Baltic Sea. He was
most likely born in 1637 in the Danish town of Helsingborg, now part of Sweden.
His father Johannes (Hans), also an organist, had immigrated to Denmark at an
unknown time from Oldesloe, in Holstein. In the year 1641 Johannes Buxtehude
was employed as the organist at St. Mary's Church, Helsingborg, and soon after
that he moved across the Øresund to become organist of St. Olai Church in
Eisinore. The exact date of Dietrich's birth is unknown, but at the time of his
death on 9 May, 1707, he was said to be about seventy years old. Baptismal
records do not extend back to 1637 in Helsingborg, Eisinore or Oldesloe. As a
child in Eisinore, Dietrich Buxtehude must have been aware of both his German
heritage and his Danish surroundings, and he appears to have grown up
bilingual. In Eisinore and during his early years in Lübeck, Buxtehude normally
spelled his name "Diderich", but later he regularly signed it
"Dieterich" or "Dietericus".
The
knowledge of Latin that Buxtehude displayed in later life indicates that he
must have attended a Latin school as a boy. Although he undoubtedly began his
organ studies with his father, further information concerning his teachers is
totally lacking. Other possible teachers in Denmark include Claus Dengel, organist
at 5t. Mary's, Elsinore, from 1650 to 1660, and Johann Lorentz, Jr., the famous
organist at 5t. Nicholas' Church, Copenhagen, from 1634 until his death in
1689. Lorentz was a pupil and son-in-law of Jacob Praetorius in Hamburg, and
the Buxtehude family made his acquaintance in 1650 upon the death of his father,
Johann Lorentz, Sr., an organ builder. Buxtehude might later have studied with Heinrich
5cheidemann in Hamburg or Franz Tunder in Lübeck.
In late
1657 or early 1658, Buxtehude assumed the same position as organist of St. Mary's
Church, Helsingborg, that his father had occupied before coming to Elsinore. He
worked there until October, 1660, when he became organist of 5t. Mary's,
Elsinore, called the German church because it served foreigners of the
community and the military garrison of Kronborg. In Elsinore, Buxtehude was
expected to play at the beginning of the service while the pastor was robing
himself; he and the cantor were to provide instrumental and vocal music for the
church on feast days and at other times at the pastor's request.
The
position of organist and Werkmeister at St. Mary's, Lübeck, became vacant upon
the death of Franz Tunder 5 November, 1667, and Dietrich Buxtehude was formally
appointed the following April. This was a much more prestigious and well-paying
position than the one he had held in Elsinore; Buxtehude was the most highly
paid musician in Lübeck, and he earned nearly as much as the pastor of St.
Mary's.
Buxtehude
swore the oath of citizenship 23 July, 1668, enabling him to marry and set up his
household. He married Anna Margaretha Tunder, a daughter of his predecessor, on
3 August, 1668. Seven daughters were born into the family of Dietrich and Anna
Margaretha Buxtehude and baptized at St. Mary's. Three died in infancy, a
fourth survived to early adulthood, and three remained in the household at the
time of Buxtehude's death: Anna Margreta, baptized 10 June, 1675, Anna Sophia,
baptized 30 August, 1678, and Dorothea Catrin, baptized 25 March, 1683.
Godparents to the Buxtehude children came from the higher strata of Lübeck
society, the families of the wealthy wholesalers who lived in St. Mary's parish
and governed both the church and the city. Buxtehude himself belonged to the
fourth social class, however, together with lesser wholesalers, retailers and
brewers. In inviting his social superiors to serve as godparents - and in some
cases naming his children after them - Buxtehude was also cultivating their patronage
for his musical enterprises.
As organist
of St. Mary's, Buxtehude's chief responsibility lay in playing the organ for
the main morning and afternoon services on sundays and feast days. He also held
the position of Werkmeister of St. Mary's, the administrator and treasurer of
the church, a position of considerable responsibility and prestige. The account
books that he kept in this capacity document the life of the church and its
music in considerable detail. The cantor of St. Mary's, also a teacher at the
Catharineum, held the responsibility for providing the liturgical music, using
his school choir of men and boys. They performed together with most of the Lübeck
municipal musicians from a large choir loft in the front of the church, over
the rood screen. Two municipal musicians, a violinist and a lutenist, regularly
performed with Buxtehude from the large organ.
Buxtehude
inherited a tradition established by Franz Tunder of performing concerts from the
large organ of St. Mary's at the request of the business community. Tunder had
gradually added vocalists and instrumentalists to his organ performances, which
are said to have taken place on Thursdays prior to the opening of the stock
exchange. Within a year of his arrival in Lübeck, Buxtehude had greatly
expanded the possibilities for the performance of concerted music from the
large organ by having two new balconies installed at the west end of the
church, each paid for by a single donor. These new balconies, together with the
four that were already there, could accommodate about forty singers and
instrumentalists. Buxtehude called his concerts Abendmusiken and changed the
time of their presentation to Sundays after vespers. In time these concerts
took place regularly on the last two Sundays of Trinity and the second, third
and fourth Sundays of Advent each year. By 1678 he had introduced the practice
of presenting oratorios of his own composition in serial fashion on these
Sundays. He also directed performances of concerted music from the large organ
during the regular church services, although this activity, like the presentation
of the Abendmusiken, lay outside his official duties to the church.
By 1703
Buxtehude had served for thirty-five years as organist ofSt. Mary's; he was
about sixty-six years old and he was no doubt concerned about the future of his
three unmarried daughters, so he began to look for a successor who would marry
Anna Margreta, the eldest, aged twenty-eight. The first prospective candidates
of whom we know were Johann Mattheson and Georg Friederich Handel, both of whom
were employed at the Hamburg opera at the time. They travelled to Lübeck together
17 August, 1703 and listened to Buxtehude "with dignified attention,"
but since neither of them was at all interested in the marriage condition, they
returned to Hamburg the following day. Johann Sebastian Bach made his famous
trip to visit Buxtehude in the fall of 1705, coinciding with the Abendmusik
season, and he remained in Lübeck for nearly three months. Bach, too, may have
been interested in obtaining the succession to Buxtehude's position, but there
is no evidence that this was the case. The account of the trip in Bach's
obituary states unambiguously that its purpose was to hear Buxtehude play the
organ, and in his report to the Arnstadt consistory upon his return the
following February, Bach stated that he had made the trip "in order to
comprehend one thing and another about his art". Buxtehude died 9 May,
1707 and was succeeded by Johann Christian Schieferdecker, who married Anna
Margreta 5 September, 1707.
Few
documents survive to illuminate the details of Buxtehude's life, but those that
do reveal a multifaceted personality to match the broad stylistic range of the
music that he composed. In addition to his varied activities as a musician
-composer, keyboard player, conductor - he worked with both numbers and words
as an accountant and a poet. He composed dedicatory poems for publications by
his friends Johann Theile and Andreas Werckmeister, and he appears to have
written the texts for several of his vocal works. He was both a dutiful
employee of the church and a bold entrepreneur in his management of the Abendmusiken.
His choice of texts for vocal music demonstrates deep Christian piety, while
his portrait with Johanli Adam Reinken in "Hausliche Musikszene",
painted in 1674 by Johann Voorhout, shows a man of the world. These two aspects
of Buxtehude's personality are neatly juxtaposed in the canon that he wrote for
the Lübeck theological student Meno Hanneken; headed by Buxtehude's motto, "non
hominibus sed Deou" (not to men but to God), its text celebrates worldly
pleasure: "Divertisons-nous aujourd'hui, bouvons à la sante de mon ami"
(Let us enjoy ourselves today and drink to the health of my friend).
The writers
of his own and the succeeding generation made only scant mention of Buxtehude;
nonetheless, he was honored, both in his own century and in the one that
followed, in a manner that was ultimately of far greater significance than any
number of verbal accolades might have been: by the copying of his music, more
of which survives, and in a greater number of genres, than from any of his
North German contemporaries. His vocal music is found chiefly in copies made by
or for his friend Gustav Düben, chapel master to the King of Sweden. Many
copies of his free organ works stem from the circle of J.S. Bach, while the surviving
manuscripts of his chorale-based organ works were copied mainly by Johann Gottfried
Walther. Buxtehude's only major publications during his lifetime were two
collections of sonatas for violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord (dacapo
8.224003 and 8.224004).
BUXTEHUDE'S
ORGAN MUSIC
Buxtehude's
keyboard music can be divided into those works that require the use of the pedal
and those that do not. The North German organs had the most developed pedal division
of any in Europe, and Buxtehude almost certainly intended his pedaliter works
for the organ, whereas those for manuals alone can be performed on harpsichord,
clavichord, or organ. Buxtehude's organ music in turn falls into two main
categories: freely composed works that do not draw on preexisting melodies, and
settings of traditional Lutheran chorales. In his free organ works, mostly
titled praeludium, Buxtehude usually combined a variety of styles and textures:
an extremely free style, also known as stylus phantasticus, and more highly
structured styles, such as fugue or the bassa-ostinata genres known as ciacona
and passacaglia.
Buxtehude
left three great independent ostinato works: the ciaconas in C minor (BuxWV 159)
and E minor (BuxWV 160) and the passacaglia in D minor (BuxWV 161). All three
are preserved in a single manuscript, known as the "Andreas Bach Buch,"
which was copied by Johann Sebastian Bach's older brother Johann Christoph
(1671-1721 ). These genres originated in Spain at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, and they soon appeared in a wide variety of Italian
instrumental and vocal music, including the keyboard music of Frescobaldi. Buxtehude
appears to have been the first to require the use of pedals in a ciacona or
passacaglia; with the repeating ostinato melody carried mainly by the pedal,
the hands become free to play complex variations above it. Buxtehude makes
little distinction between the two related terms, although the fact that his
passacaglia is notated in 3/2 while the ciaconas are in 3/4 could suggest that
the passacaglia should be played more slowly. The D-minor passacaglia is also
notable for its very clear formal and tonal plan: four sections, in D minor, F
major, A minor, and D minor, each consisting of seven variations on the
four-measure bass melody.
Buxtehude
also occasionally incorporated ostinato passages into his great multi-sectional
praeludia;
the final section of his C major praeludium (BuxWV 137, at 03:57) is in fact labeled
ciacona. The wide octave leaps of its three-measure ostinato are announced in
the opening virtuosic pedal solo of the first section. Here we meet the stylus
phantasticus, so idiomatic to keyboard music, with its constantly shifting
textures and number of voices, from fast-moving scales to block chords, from homophonic
figuration to suggestions of fugues -one never knows what to expect. The real
fugue that follows (at 01:50), by contrast, works its way systematically from
one to four voices with statements of the subject followed by answers in the
dominant, and it continues in this way until each voice - easily identified as
soprano, alto, tenor, and bass -has stated both subject and answer twice.
The two
praeludia in G minor on this disk also contain ostinato sections. BuxWV 149, justifiably
one of Buxtehude's most frequently performed works, combines ostinato and stylus
phontasticus in its opening section. The opening flourish in the manuals could
lead anywhere, but it turns out to be the figuration above an ostinato when the
pedal finally makes its appearance. This praeludium is further notable for its
two fugues with related subjects: the first in a sober, archaic, ricercar style;
the second an affective fuga pathetica in slow triple meter, one of Buxtehude's
finest. The ostinato section that concludes the other G-minor praeludium (BuxWV
148, at 04:51) is totally different. Here the two-measure theme is first
announced in the pedal without accompaniment, and thereafter it migrates quite regularly
into the upper voices.
The chorale
settings included on this CD are all of the type that Buxtehude cultivated most
extensively, or perhaps that were most useful to Johann Gottfried Walther,
whose manuscript copies provide the only sources for them. Each of these works
states the chorale melody just once, in the soprano voice, designated in the
manuscripts to be performed on a separate manual, with the middle two voices to
be played on another manual and the bass on the pedal. They probably represent
written out versions of the introductions to hymns that Buxtehude improvised as
a church organist, the position he held for his entire career. The melodies are
often highly ornamented; in fact the ministers of St. Mary's Church in Lübeck,
where he served from 1668 until his death in 1707, decided in 1701 to hang boards
with the hymn numbers in the church, because "from the organ playing
beforehand, the hymns can be recognized by only a few".
The chorale
melodies printed here come from a manuscript written for the use of the choir
of St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, probably some time during the early part of Buxtehude's
tenure there, and certainly before the cantor Jacob Pagendarm prepared a
manuscript with new settings in 1705. These are all traditional chorales for
the great feasts of the church year - Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Trinity and
the Advent season - and they date from the first years of the Reformation or
even earlier. Any member of the congregation would have recognized the chorales
"Lobt Gott, ihr Christen allzu Gleich" and "Gott der Vater wohn
uns bei" from Buxtehude's settings of them, but some might have lost their
way during his exuberant chorale prelude on "Komm, Heilger Geist, Herre
Gott" (BuxWV 199), where he ornaments the hymn melody far more than he
does in its companion setting, BuxWV 200. His style of ornamentation for all
these pieces comes originally from vocal practice, and while the chorale is
present the organ emulates the texture of a singer accompanied by continuo. In
the interludes between each line, however, Buxtehude draws upon the contrapuntal
tradition to introduce the next line with imitation. Even in these very short pieces,
we see Buxtehude's compositional art in his seamless joining of these two
styles.
@ Kerala J.
Snyder 2003
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