So revered was the Danish-born organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude that a young JS Bach walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck just to see him play the organ and meet him in person.
Buxtehude's reputation as composer and performer spread far beyond the confines of the Marienkirche whose organ lofts he graced for nigh on 40 years.
We named Buxtehude one of the greatest Baroque composers ever.
When was Dieterich Buxtehude born?
Of German ancestry, Dieterich Buxtehude was probably born in Helsingborg where his father was a church organist. By 1645 the family is living just across the sea in Elsinore, then Denmark’s second largest and most prosperous city.
Buxtehude was born into a world in which Monteverdi was on the cusp of publishing his Madrigals of Love and War (in a Europe consumed by the all-too-real Thirty Years’ War), and into an intellectual climate about to be get a good shake-up with Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ Discours de la méthode. Not that this worried the good citizens of Helsingborg – the likely place of his birth – too much.
Where did Buxtehude study?
The young Buxtehude probably received his education at the Latin School in Elsinore (to which town his organist father had meanwhile moved) and, as in the Bach family, musical training was almost certainly ‘in-house’. But was there, too, the organ equivalent of finishing school?
Did Dieterich head to Copenhagen? Or might he have gone to Hamburg whose four main churches would soon each boast a Sweelinck pupil at the console? Equally, were the seeds of his future sown by a trip to Lübeck where the all-important business community was kept sweet by the recitals Franz Tunder gave in the Marienkirche on Thursdays before the opening of the stock exchange?
Nobody knows. Perhaps he simply stayed put. His first two jobs at any rate suggest a bit of a home bird (a year as organist at his father’s old church in Helsingborg followed by a return to Elsinore). What’s remarkable is that unlike Georg Muffat, who absorbed French influences directly from Lully in Paris and Italian style from Corelli in Rome, Buxtehude produced some of the most original music of the 17th century without recourse to the creative nourishment of a travel-broadened mind. One trip, however, lay around the corner and it would change his life.
In 1667, Franz Tunder died. And, on 11 April 1668, in the teeth of vigorous competition for what was one of the key positions in North German church music, Buxtehude became Organist and Werkmeister (a sort of clerical chief executive) to Lübeck’s Marienkirche.
The city in which he now found himself was cosmopolitan and vibrant, even if its glory days at the head of the old Hanseatic League were over.
Who did Buxtehude marry and did they have children?
When Buxtehude obligingly married Anna Margaretha Tunder, Tunder’s daughter, as a Class Four citizen he was allowed to serve cake but not wine at the wedding, and he exceeded the permitted number of guests and musicians perhaps only on account of his singular position in Lübeck’s musical life.
Together they had seven daughters.
How did Buxtehude influence music?
One aspect of that musical life was about to get a transformation: the so-called Abendmusiken (evening concerts) which had grown out of Tunder’s merchant-pleasing recitals. Scarcely had Buxtehude familiarised himself with the church’s three organs than he had two new galleries erected allowing space for some 40 singers and instrumentalists.
The five annual concerts, given in the late-afternoon wintry chill of November and December, were poised to become crowd-pullers of European renown; and for Buxtehude, fundraiser (the concerts were free), composer and conductor, the stage was set for a much more ambitious phase in his musical output. Reminiscing later, music historian Caspar Reutz suggested that the performances afforded ‘a complete drama per musica’, only needing the singers to act for the Abendmusiken to trespass into ‘sacred opera’.
Scored for six solo voices and a ‘heavenly choir’, The Wedding of the Lamb showed 1678 audiences Buxtehude’s fast-developing grasp of oratorio possibilities, and the following year the anti was upped to almost 40 assorted musicians... incurring a financial loss. In effect Buxtehude was evolving a framework capable of sustaining the great Passions of his fervent admirer JS Bach.
Did JS Bach meet Buxtehude?
In 1705 a visit from JS Bach coincided with performances of Castrum doloris and Templum honoris. Indeed, it can have been no coincidence that Bach walked to Lübeck in 1705, when ‘extraordinary’ Abendmusiken was in the offing. To commemorate the death of Emperor Leopold I and the accession of Joseph I, Buxtehude produced two oratorios suitably sumptuously worked for the occasion: Castrum doloris and Templum honoris.
How many miles did Bach walk to meet Buxtehude?
Even the straightest of flying crows would be hard pushed to cover the distance from Arnstadt to Lübeck in 200 miles – the distance many writers have ascribed to JS Bach’s epic trek in the winter of 1705 to visit Buxtehude.
Depending on the route taken, the 20 year-old organist of the Neuekirche would have needed shoe leather for nearer 300, but the prize was evidently worth the investment. Handel must have thought so too.
He popped over from nearby Hamburg in 1703 in the company of Johann Mattheson.
How did Buxtehude influence Bach?
Both Castrum doloris and Templum honoris are lost – as are all the oratorios (unless you accept the repackaged authenticity of Das Jungste Gericht) – but not lost on Bach was the very public facet of Buxtehude’s art (its influence on Bach’s cantatas would be practical as well as spiritual), and more particularly he came face to face, ear to ear, with the genius of the German ‘stylus phantasticus’ at its most ‘fantastic’.
Already in possession of some of Buxtehude’s organ music which he’d copied as a boy, Bach now experienced its roots in the improvisations which fertilised all aspects of Buxtehude’s musical imagination. Famously, Bach hungrily outstayed his leave by three months.
Equally famously, when he returned home the congregation of the Neuekirche found his chorale elaborations hard to follow. It’s a neat twist that only a couple of years earlier the authorities at the Marienkirche had seen fit to provide boards for hymn numbers after complaints that Buxtehude’s own complex preluding had left worshippers wondering which chorale was being introduced.
What is Buxtehude's music like?
It’s easy to sympathise with the bafflement. Whether in the big-boned organ Praeludia or the intimate sonatas for violin, gamba and continuo published as Opuses 1 & 2 in the 1690s, Buxtehude’s extrovert brilliance so often tips over into a private world of soulful (perhaps short-lived) soliloquising. Even the brilliance can assume a defiant whimsicality.
It’s what gives the music its sense of living in the moment and its individuality. But the Bach of the G minor Organ Fantasia or Chromatic Fantasia absorbed more than the superficial extremes of Buxtehude’s ever-inquisitive style. There were structural lessons to learn, too. The long-term variation strategies of Buxtehude’s La Capricciosa, for example, engineer a 32-section workout for a bergamasca melody which surfaces in Bach’s similarly 32-movement Goldberg Variations. And Buxtehude’s D minor organ Passacaglia spookily anticipates Bach’s great specimen in C minor.
Inevitably, perhaps, it was the organ music that spearheaded the Buxtehude revival which started on the back of Philip Spitta’s celebrated biography of Bach. The vocal works have stepped out from the shadows more cautiously though. That Buxtehude could rise to the venerable ‘stilo antico’ is evident in the Missa alla brevis, and an early six-choir Benedicam Dominum salutes the Venetians in their own coin; yet if the vocal concerto signals Buxtehude’s contrapuntal skill, the arias disclose his immediacy at its most guileless.
What is Buxtehude's most famous piece of music?
Buxtehude's most famous vocal work is the pietistically enrapt Membra Jesu Nostri, a set of seven cantatas meditating on the body of the crucified Christ in a language sometimes harrowingly anguished, sometimes tenderly serene, and full of that spirit which moved one Lübeck contemporary to observe that ‘in the ardour of his compositions, Buxtehude understood well how to give a foretaste of heavenly bliss’. More than three hundred years after his death, that unquenchable ‘ardour’ remains more potent than ever.
When did Buxtehude die?
Buxtehude died on 9 May in Lübeck and is buried in St Mary’s church. His assistant, Johann Christian Schieferdecker, succeeds Buxtehude as organist, marrying his daughter Anna Margreta later the same year.
Dieterich Buxtehude in the 1674 painting The Musical Party by Johannes Voorhout. Photography by Alexander M. Winkler