Dietrich Buxtehude (c.1637-1707)
Harpsichord Works
Dietrich Buxtehude was probably born in 1637 in
Oldesloe in the Duchy of Holstein, then Danish
territory, now German. A year later the family moved to
Helsingborg in Scania, then Danish, now Swedish,
when his father Johannes was appointed organist. Thus
three countries call Buxtehude their own. Given the
fluidity of borders in the region, it is of no great
importance, but Buxtehude is said to have considered
himself a Dane. Perhaps the Free Imperial City of
Lübeck, where he spent the last forty years of his
seventy-year lifespan as organist of the Marienkirche,
has the best claim. Like Sweelinck before him, who
seldom left Amsterdam, Buxtehude stayed close to his
instrument all through his years of maturity.
Buxtehude’s large corpus of brilliant organ music
has overshadowed his equally impressive vocal and
chamber music, some of which was composed for his
famous Advent Sunday concerts, the Abendmusiken.
His harpsichord works are less numerous, and buried
mainly at the back of organ editions, where they are
ignored by organists because they have no pedal parts.
The standard edition of the keyboard works which are
clearly secular, suites and variations, announces itself as
‘Buxtehude - Piano Works’, which is really no help. The
pieces contained therein seem at first glance rather
conventional. They are deceptively simple, like Scarlatti
or Mozart. It is hoped that this recording will contribute
to a re-evaluation of Buxtehude as one of the finest
German composers for the harpsichord of the
seventeenth century, the only one worthy of mention in
the same breath with Froberger. He did what Bach did
half a century later: he took the forms he saw around
him, French suites, Italian toccatas and canzonas,
variation techniques from the German Sweelinck-school
and later on from Rome, and made them unmistakably
his own.
Of the two suites offered here, the Suite in G minor
follows the Allemande - Courante - Sarabande - Gigue
order of dances that had only very recently become
fashionable. The other is a rare hybrid of suite and
chorale-partita, wherein the chorale melody Auf meinen
lieben Gott is varied through a sequence of dance
movements, Allemande - Double (variation)- Sarabande
- Courante - Gigue.
The two Praeludia hark back to the luxuriant
Roman toccata tradition of the earlier seventeenth
century. Quasi-improvisatory passages alternate with
brief fugues. That in G minor is one of the grandest
examples of this Stylus Phantasticus. There is no fixed
form here. The compartmentalised Prelude and Fugue
was a product of classicising tendencies in the latter part
of the century.
The Toccata in G major already clearly tends in this
direction. Buxtehude is responding here, as well, to the
new, more mechanical virtuosity of the famous Roman
harpsichordist Bernardo Pasquini. There is only one
fugue after the initial free section. It is followed
seamlessly by a remarkable coda, where a six-note bassline
is varied like a chaconne on a roller-coaster.
The Canzonetta in G major represents one of the
two forerunners of the Bachian fugue, the Canzona alla
francese, the other being the ricercar, of which no
example by Buxtehude survives. In the Canzonetta,
Buxtehude continues the earlier tradition of
sectionalisation by varying the theme - just once, in this
case.
The Aria with two variations in A minor, which
glows darkly like a candle-lit interior of the seventeenth
century, still owes much to the Sweelinck tradition, and
must be an earlier work than La Capricciosa. This latter
is Buxtehude’s Goldberg Variations, a catalogue of
variation techniques on a monumental scale, by far the
longest of the handful of sets that have come down to us
from his pen. There is even a parody of a bad
harpsichordist, with too many ornaments (all on the
wrong notes), rhythmically and harmonically erratic,
choppy line and heavy hand - a type, alas, all too
familiar even today. To avoid misunderstandings, I
should make it clear that I am talking about Variation
27.
A comparison with Bach’s masterpiece reveals
some striking parallels: large quantities of very similar
figuration, identical key and number of movements, and
precisely half the number of bars in the same binary
form. Most arresting, however, is the fact that, in spite
of the source’s claim that it is an aria di inventione
newly-composed), Buxtehude’s theme is the
Bergamasca, a simple I-IV-V-I harmonic scheme, with
a melody known in Germany as Kraut und Rüben,
which Bach used in his final variation, the Quodlibet.
These are too many similarities to be coincidental. Bach
must have known the piece, and paid homage to his
greatest mentor in the Goldberg Variations, as he did a
few years later in The Art of Fugue.
It is even possible that both sets are the fruit of an
encounter between a mature master and a young genius:
Bach and Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, Buxtehude and
Johann Pachelbel. Pachelbel, who had close links to the
Bach family, dedicated his most famous set of published
variations (Hexachordum Apollonis) to Buxtehude, and
the similarities in their variation styles are so great that
it is impossible to say who influenced whom more
profoundly. The younger man certainly had more firsthand
familiarity with late developments in Italy and
Austria, but he seems to have comprehended the true
stature of the Lübeck organist, learned from him, and
held him in the highest esteem.
There is also an interesting parallel with two earlier
sets of variations: Froberger’s Meyerin and Reincken’s
set on the same tune. Both are in G major, and
Reincken, the emulator/expander in this case, also
doubled the number of variations, from nine to eighteen.
Thus Froberger, Frescobaldi’s prophet in Germany,
seems to stand at the beginning of a concatenation of
German variations in G, the key of such popular Italian
themes as Ruggiero, Aria di Fiorenza, the Ciacona, and
of course, the Bergamasca. Bach knew Reincken, the
organist of St Catherine’s in Hamburg, from his school
days, and performed on his organ with Reincken present
in 1720, two years before his death at the age of 99 - so
here we have another wellspring for the Goldberg
Variations.
Without Buxtehude, no Bach. Everyone knows the
story of how Bach got into trouble with his employers in
Arnstadt by massively overstaying the leave of absence
granted him for study with Buxtehude, and how he
could have succeeded to the organ at the Marienkirche if
he had been willing to marry Buxtehude’s spinster
daughter. Such anecdotes tend to obscure the salient fact
that Bach risked his important first job as an organist in
order to imbibe a little longer at the most richly flowing
source available to him. Too many organists go back no
further in their six hundred years of repertoire than
Buxtehude, and see him as a kind of preparatory stage to
the ‘real’ music of J.S. Bach, and harpsichordists
generally neglect him. This is a great injustice. Dietrich
Buxtehude was one of the greatest of a number of giants
upon whose shoulders Bach perched. The fully-ripened
composer of the Goldberg Variations and The Art of
Fugue still looked to him for inspiration.
Glen Wilson
