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, Helsinghorg, and
soon after that he moved across the Øresund to become organist of St. Olai Church
in Helsingør. 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, Helsingør or Oldesloe. As
a child in Helsingør, Dietrich Buxtehude must have been aware of both his German
heritage and his Danish surroundings, and he appears to have grown up bilingual.
In Helsingør 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 St Mary's, Helsingør, from 1650 to 1660, and Johann Lorentz, Jr.,
the famous organist at St 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 Scheidemann in Hamburg or Franz Tunder in Lübeck.
In late
1657 or early 1658, Buxtehude took up the same position as organist of St
Mary's
Church,
Helsingborg, that his father had occupied before coming to Helsingør. He worked
there until October, 1660, when he became organist of St Mary's, Helsingør,
called the German church because it served foreigners of the community and the
military garrison of Kronborg. In Helsingør, 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 on 5 November 1667, and Dietrich Buxtehude was
formally appointed the following April. This was a much more prestigious and
well paid position than the one he had held in Helsingør; 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 on 23 July 1668, enabling him to marry and set up
his household. He married Anna Margarethe Tunder, a daughter of his
predecessor, on 3 August, 1668. Seven daughters were born into the family of
Dietrich and Anna Margarethe 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 after 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 of St 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 ills 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 on 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 per5onality 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 dedicatoty 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 Johann 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 Deo" (not to men but to God), its text celebrates worldly
pleasure: "Divertisons nous aujourd'hui, bouvons 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 Keyboard Music
Keyboard music of the seventeenth century was not usually designated for
particular instruments, and most of it could be played on organ, harpsichord,
or clavichord. The manuscripts that transmit Buxtehude's keyboard music, however,
generally restrict themselves to one of three types of music that can indeed
be associated with particular instruments: free works such as praeludia and
toccatas, many of them designated "pedaliter," and thus for organ; settings
of German chorales, most of them also requiring the pedal; and a distinctly
secular repertoire consisting of dance suites and variations, presumably for
harpsichord. But these boundaries are by no means rigid, and these recordings
exploit such fluidity by drawing from all three genres for their programs.
Nearly all
of Buxtehude's suites and variations on secular tunes are preserved in a single
Danish manuscript, now at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, which contains the
history of the Ryge family reading in one direction and a collection of
keyboard music, mainly by Buxtehude, in the other. The musical portion was
probably copied early in the eighteenth century. The fact that two of the
suites attributed to Buxtehude in this manuscript were actually composed by
Nicolas-An-toine Lebègue underlines the stylistic similarity of the German
keyboard suite to French models, particularly in the use of stile brise, which
the French clavecinistes had adapted from lute music. The standardization of
the movements to Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue, however, can be
credited to German composers.
The
selection of suites offered here, in C major (BuxWV 226), D minor (BuxWV 233) E
minor (BuxWV 235), F major (BuxWV 238), G minor (BuxWV 242), and A major (BuxWV
243), presents the intimate, domestic aspect of Buxtehude's keyboard art. In
each case, the allemande is the weightiest element, "the proposition in a
musical suite, from which the corrente, sarabande and gique [sic] flow as
parts," in the words of Buxtehude's grandstudent Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann.
Indeed, the openings of Buxtehude's correntes often follow the melodic contour
of the allemande, and in the case of the F major suite (BuxWV 238) the corrente
approaches an actual variation of it. The Ryge manuscript usually spells this
movement "Courent" in a curious mixture of French and Italian; in
fact Buxtehude usually follows the Italian corrente, with its lightly running
eighth-note motion, rather than the more subtle French courante. Fuhrmann
characterizes the Sarabande as an "instrumental aria, usually eight
measures, going slowly in triple," and this is the shortest and simplest
movement of a Buxtehude suite. Two of these suites (BuxWV 226 and 233) present
a second sarabande that is not a double, or variation, of the first. The second
sarabande of BuxWV 233 has a distinctly vocal quality, as opposed to the more
instrumental stile brise of the first. The gigues in Buxtehude's suites have a
more contrapuntal texture than the other movements, but they are not strictly
fugal, usually dissolving into homophony after a few entrances. It is through
the gigue, however, that the dance makes itself most strongly felt in the other
genres of Buxtehude's keyboard music.
Each of the
three variation sets is grounded in dance rhythms. "Courent Zimble,"
(BuxWV 245) as its name implies, is a courante, shorter and simpler than those
in the suites. Each of its eight variations is highly unified in its figuration.
The set of three variations named simply "Aria" (BuxWV 249) is based
on the sarabande, reminding us of Fuhrmann's definition of the sarabande as an
instrumental aria. Its second and third variations contain written-out varied
repetitions of each of the sections of the binary form, demonstrating how Buxtehude
might actually have performed those repetitions that he normally indicated only
with repeat marks. His most famous variation set, also labelled
"Aria," but subtitled "La Capricciosa" (BuxWV 250), follows
the Bergamasca, a dance that originated in Italy during the 16th century and
was widespread throughout Europe in the 17th century. Its first half also
appears as the Thuringian song "Kraut und Ruben" that J.S. Bach used
in the quodlibet concluding the Goldberg variations (BWV 988), but it is
unlikely that Buxtehude knew it in this form. Bach may have known "La
Capricciosa," on the other hand, since, like his Goldberg Variations, it
is a virtuoso showpiece consisting of 32 variations on an aria in G major. In
"La Capricciosa" Buxtehude layers dance upon dance, changing the
simple duple meter of the Bergamasca to that of a gigue (partite 9 and 19), a
sarabande (partita 25), and a minuet (partite 29 and 30).
Buxtehude's
chorale settings for keyboard are preserved mainly in manuscripts compiled by Johann
Gottfried Walther, organist in Weimar and cousin of J. S. Bach. Although most
of them require two manuals and pedal, a few do not, and there is no reason why
they should be confined to the church organ. One in particular seems
appropriate for performance on the harpsichord: the Partita "Auf meinen
lieben Gott" (BuxWV 179). Here Buxtehude combines three genres - the dance
suite, the variation set, and the chorale setting - to produce an unusual hybrid
form, consisting of Allemande (unnamed), Double, Courante, Sarabande, and
Gigue. "Wie schon leuchtet der Morgenstern" (BuxWV 223) belongs to
the genre of the chorale fantasy, in which each phrase of a chorale melody is
developed rather extensively in a different manner. Here too the gigue makes a
prominent appearance, concluding the work in a fugal treatment of the entire
melody. Buxtehude's manualiter setting of "Nun lob, mein Seel, den
Herren" (BuxWV 215) follows the chorale in its lilting, triple meter.
Buxtehude's
free keyboard works - those independent of a preexisting melody or dance pattern
- are mainly transmitted in manuscripts that include both pedaliter and manualiter
works. Among these, his most original and justly famous works are praeludia and
toccatas in the stylus phantasticus, which intermingles highly unpredictable
free sections in virtuosic and idiomatic keyboard styles with more structured fugal
sections. Since organists naturally prefer the pedaliter works, those for
manuals alone are much less frequently performed, thus offering rich opportunities
to adventurous harpsichordists. Even in these free works one can find elements of
dance and variation' In the G-major Praeludium (BuxWV 162) the second fugue is
a variation, in gigue rhythm, of the first. In place of a second fugue, the
G-major Toccata (BuxWV 165) contains a brief passage of ostinato variations that
are faintly reminiscent of Pachelbel's famous canon. Buxtehude may have
conceived his canzonas as teaching pieces; they are all manualiter works, and
students most often practiced on the clavichord or harpsichord. They are
variously titled canzon, canzonet, or fuga and consist either of a single fugue
(BuxWV 174 and 225) or of three related fugues (BuxWV 166, 168, 170 and 176) in
the manner of the variation canzona inherited from Frescobaldi and Froberger. Friedrich
Wilhelm Marpurg, in his Abbandlung von der Fuge (1753), used the third fugue of
BuxWV 168 as an illustration of a counter fugue, in which the answer moves in
contrary motion to the subject. The gigue makes an appearance yet again in
these works, as the second fugue of BuxWV 166 and 170 and as the sole fugue of BuxWV
174, one of Buxtehude's most engaging and popular fugues.
Kerala
Snyder, 1998
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