Dieterich Buxtehude, Music, & the Experience of Life
Our experience of classical music has become rather abstract, detached, and academic. When the great composers were active, music was closely interwoven with everyday life. Music was always “live” and enjoyed in the company of other people, not in isolation. As often as not it was composed for specific occasions, whether secular or sacred. Otherwise, it was performed informally among friends, not so much as a “concert” in our modern sense but more in the nature of a friendly gathering. When public concerts did occur, they were usually attended by a select audience associated with a noble house or parish church. For the most part music was created not for a vast global “market” but for a specific city, house, church, or community.
Today music surrounds us constantly and is readily available in electronic form, to the extent that the entire history of the art is at our fingertips. But granting that there is a greater quantity of music now, is our experience of music qualitatively any more meaningful than it was for our ancestors of centuries ago?
I think the opposite case could be made. Quantity, or frequency of occurrence, does not equal quality. All our experience tells us that a greater quantity of anything tends to dilute the experience of it. Music today is listened to more abstractly and passively than ever before in history. While more music is heard than ever before, it’s probably true that fewer people actively make music.
We have arrived at the paradox that more “classical” music is disseminated today than every before, yet it is done so in a form and manner that is inimical to the way that the work was originally created and heard.
“Classical music” is itself a fairly recent concept, going back no further than the early Romantic period, and the formation of a distinct canon of works associated with the term was the work of the 19th and 20th centuries. “Classical music” would have been an entirely foreign concept to, say, Johann Sebastian Bach. For him, music was now, and he had to supply a constant demand of it for the functions of everyday life. The idea of creating art for posterity was characteristic of Romanticism. In Bach’s era the idea was for an artist to do a good job, to be a faithful servant, in the here and now.
And in Bach’s day, music was something to be done, not thought about. Music lovers did not spend hours debating how violinist X and violinist Y played executed a trill differently. They were too busy actually making music.
And music was everywhere. In church, in the village square, in elegant salons of the noblemen. Music for courtly dancing; music for theatrical performances: opera, plays, ballets. Real music, performed by live human beings. Music was experiential to a degree we can scarcely imagine today, when recordings have “frozen” the art form, making it something more like painting or architecture. (And yet recording has its own virtues, allowing us to preserve ideals of performance for reference, enjoyment, and study, to diffuse music widely and allow it to “last longer”—to some extent overcoming its limited and ephemeral nature. This too is a great good.)
We see Bach as the beginning of the Common Practice Period. This is the period that constitutes the mainstream “classical music” repertoire, and it includes the great Germanic line of composers from Bach and Handel through Bach’s sons, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (the Viennese Classicists), and on through Schubert and the German Romantics.
Anything before Bach is typically classed as “early music” and is a somewhat specialized field of interest. This is unfortunate, because there are many musical riches before Bach. Music is a continuing tradition, with each generation building upon the last. Bach’s genius and accomplishments were enormous, but they did not come out of a vacuum. He had an important early inspiration and mentor. His name was Dieterich Buxtehude.
What follows is a brief sketch of this pivotal yet all-too-little-known composer and musician. I wish to highlight in particular how he (like other artists of his day) made music a part of life. In this sense Buxtehude is an illustration of how music used to be enjoyed in a world very different from our own.
Buxtehude: A Life in Music
Dieterich Buxtehude was born in 1637, probably in Denmark. The “probably” is due to the fact that nationality and borders were rather fluid then, and Buxtehude’s exact birthplace is not known. One thing that was certain in that part of the world was Lutheran Christianity. The son of a church organist, Buxtehude served in turn as an organist and choir leader in Lutheran churches in Elsinore (earlier immortalized by Shakespeare as the setting for Hamlet). Later he moved across the border to northern Germany, becoming organist at St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck, a city which would become a vibrant center of music under his leadership.
One of the reasons we should take our hats off to Buxtehude is his role in creating the concert as we know it today. Sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental works came together in the Abendmusik (evening music), a series of hour-long evening performances held in St. Mary’s starting in 1670. The tradition had started with Buxtehude’s predecessor, who had leavened workaday duties with the sweet blessing of music by performing short morning concerts for the city’s tradesmen before they went to work at the stock exchange.
Buxtehude built these performances up into dramatic ecclesiastical symphonies, with singers and up to 40 instrumentalists (a sizeable orchestra for the time) combining with the spiritual architecture of the church to raise glory to God. The Abendmusik concerts were so popular that they continued long after Buxtehude’s death, right up until 1810.
But concerts were special events for Buxtehude. His regular duties in Lübeck included composing and performing music for the city’s main public functions: cantatas for Sunday services, composed on the scriptural theme of the day; and music for weddings, birthdays, and banquets. And when all the official ceremonies were done, there was still informal music-making in the home. Because the way to hear music in those days was to make it yourself.
A familiar painting from the time, “The Musical Party” by the Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Voorhout, gives us a clear picture of the kind of convivial domestic music-making that was a part of life in those days. It also gives an idea of the deeper, spiritual significance that music had in the culture of the Baroque.
The painting shows a group of men and women enjoying music together, playing the viola da gamba, the harpsichord, and the lute, with a singer. The man playing the viola da gamba (a close relative of the cello) is most probably Buxtehude, and if so, this is the only image we have of him. The man at the harpsichord is Buxtehude’s good friend and fellow composer Adam Reincken.
There is more to the painting than the musicians, though. In the background we see a couple in love, gazing upon each other. What is being envisioned here is music as a force expressing love and harmony, order and coherence. The artists in the foreground seem to bring into being, through their art, the ideal paradisical world of the background, with the castle garden and loving couple—everybody cloaked in Baroque costume awash in flowing grace and elegance. These aesthetic ideals were native to the Baroque era and can be sensed in its glorious music.
“The Musical Party” also provides a snapshot of what an informal gathering of chamber music looked like. In such musical parties, improvisation—the art of inventing music extemporaneously, or of embellishing and expanding upon a written score on the spot—was second nature, and it was key to Baroque art. The typical Baroque chamber group (like the ensemble depicted here) was not unlike a jazz combo. There was the melody line, the bass line, and the harmony-and-rhythm section (supplied by the harpsichord or lute). Far from being strictly tied down to a musical “text,” players could interpret their parts with a certain freedom, adding tasteful embellishments or “graces” and in general taking an active role in interpreting the affect (emotional meaning) of the piece.
Music-making in general was freer, more uninhibited than the typical concert atmosphere of later centuries. This was after all an era when men wore, not the formal “penguin suit” of black and white, but large floppy hats with plumes and flowing lace neckerchiefs. Such a culture gave birth to the stylus fantasticus, the fantastic style—a type of instrumental music in which free-flowing fantasies, seemingly improvised, alternated with music in a scholarly contrapuntal style to create a colorful ever-changing musical mosaic, expressing the multifaceted nature of life itself.
We can hear this “fantastic style” in Buxtehude’s wonderful chamber sonatas featuring the violin, the bass viola da gamba, and the harpsichord. In these pieces Buxtehude loosened up the strict boundaries of form to concentrate on expression, virtuosity, unpredictable harmony, and mercurial changes of mood.
This sort of inspired flight of fantasy is something that composers in the classical tradition, I believe, would have done well to use more often. Musical form from the Classical period onward can get cut-and-dried, routine. An experiment: listen to a Buxtehude sonata and see if this is not, in a sheerly visceral sense, a welcome antidote to much of the standard “classical music” canon. Such exuberance within clear forms as Buxtehude achieves is the reason why we listen to any music at all, or so it seems to me.
One of the keys to 1600s music, including Buxtehude’s, is the ground bass or basso ostinato. This technique involves a continually repeating bass line acting as a foundation for intricate variations played by the melody instruments (and in many performances, the variations may have been literally improvised). With results that can be kaleidoscopic or hypnotic, the ground bass with its combination of stability and change expressed a sense of the eternal.
The Musical Ethos
What we hear in Buxtehude, let me emphasize, is not the mild-mannered and somewhat superficial charm of the rococo era, which gave birth to the more substantial gifts of Haydn and Mozart. No, this is something earlier and earthier, with a sense of spiritual mystery and wonder at the order and workings of the cosmos. You can hear it in the twang of the harpsichord and the zing of a violin string strung in the Baroque manner with catgut.
No matter what form it is written in or whether it is sacred or secular, Buxtehude’s music brings this entire cultural world alive; it is the nearest thing to hearing voices from the past. This world was formed by religious and spiritual beliefs, certainly. To my way of thinking it was essentially still a catholic and sacramental world, though Lutheranism was the official creed. For although it is characteristically “northern,” we also hear in Buxtehude’s music an openness to more southernly inspiration and climes, to Italian and Catholic influences, perhaps more than other German Lutheran composers of the day.
A case in point is Membra Jesu nostri (Our Jesus’ Limbs), a cycle of cantatas which Buxtehude wrote for Good Friday in 1680. The set of medieval Latin poems is each addressed to a different part of the crucified Savior’s body: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and face. Buxtehude’s music highlights the clear-cut rhythm and flow of the poetry; but on a deeper emotional level, it enhances the believer’s identification with Christ’s suffering, especially through an affective use of dissonance and consonance. This cantata cycle has been described as the first Passion oratorio, an example to Bach and others.
The Modernity of the Baroque
To get a sense of how new and modern this kind of music would have sounded to audiences at the time takes just a small effort of historical admiration. Just picture yourself as a person of the 1600s, used to the noble and stately sacred polyphony of the Renaissance. You are in church and you hear music of jubilation, but which seems to come out of the secular world of the dance. Organs, violins, and wind instruments are playing, producing joyous fanfares and exuberantly interweaving polyphony. It is polyphony, but not the polyphony of Palestrina; it is the new counterpoint of the Baroque, an aesthetic that seems to unite heaven and earth in an exhilarating dance.
For this was a cultural world in which the sacred and the secular were not cordoned off into separate spaces but shared the dance floor, closely intertwined.
If we are to appreciate the art of the past, I believe we should engage in this kind of exercise—to sense the artwork as something fresh and novel, not staid and routine. This is precisely what “historically informed” musicians try to do when performing the music of the Baroque and other periods.
The bulk of Buxtehude’s work includes organ music—many preludes and fugues—and vocal music for church, including many cantatas in German and Latin, all of which served as models for Bach in his own essays in these genres, written for his own parish community in Germany.
Sadly, many of Buxtehude’s works are lost, known only by their titles in a catalog or descriptions in a contemporary review. Music, like any other human object, often goes missing, subject to war or fire or displacement, changes in musical fashion, or just plain indifference. It’s not just frustrating, it’s heartbreaking that we are unable to hear Buxtehude’s harpsichord suites based on the planets—a work he is known to have written but which has not survived. Music in those days was too often governed by fashion, and because the work of composers like Buxtehude was deemed unstylish by succeeding generations there was little effort to preserve it.
With the revival of interest in Bach in the early 19th century—thanks to Felix Mendelssohn and others—came an accompanying interest in the composers who influenced Bach, and Buxtehude was the first on the list. Today, spurred on even more by the early music movement since World War II, most of Buxtehude’s extant works have been catalogued, studied, and recorded. Will new compositions by Buxtehude (and other great composers) come to light?
Art for a Higher Purpose
Earlier I touched on the immediacy of a musician’s duties in the Baroque era. We of a later day are used to a conception of art that sees the artist as an egotistical creator, expressing himself. In Buxtehude’s day, the artist was more in the nature of a public servant, a humble artisan who served the common good. Buxtehude seems to have been even more modest in this regard than Bach or Mozart, both of whom experienced friction with the power structure above them. Buxtehude in his dealings with higher-ups seems to have been the soul of courtesy and he adopted as his motto non hominibus sed Deo (not to man but to God). His devout and humble nature must surely have been one of the reasons why he was so revered.
Buxtehude Passes the Torch
One of those who most revered Buxtehude was a young organist and composer named Johann Sebastian Bach. If many classical music fans know Buxtehude’s name at all, it’s in connection with the well-known story of Bach travelling over 200 miles (on foot, as the legend has it) to hear Buxtehude perform in Lübeck. Bach was then 20 years old and enthralled with Buxtehude, one of Germany’s best and most famous musicians. He obtained leave from his superiors “to go up there to understand something or other about Buxtehude’s art.”
In October 1705, just as the rehearsals for that year’s Abendmusik were about to get underway, Bach arrived in Lübeck. He had obtained permission to stay for four weeks; he ended up staying three months.
What happened during Bach’s time with Buxtehude? He undoubtedly participated in the Abendmusik concerts as a violinist. And he probably had one-on-one time with Buxtehude, taking lessons on the organ or in composition, absorbing the principles of the older man’s art. Bach’s contact with Buxtehude was foundational to his career. In many ways, Bach became Buxtehude’s spiritual successor as organist, composer, and devout Christian musician.
Finale
Buxtehude might seem at first glance an interesting minor figure, the “man who influenced Bach.” But consider: if he was a decisive inspiration to Bach, that means that Buxtehude can lay claim to being the immediate progenitor of the mainstream classical music tradition we all enjoy.
During the Baroque era, music attained a richness, sensuousness, and splendor it had never before had. An outgrowth of Humanism, the extravagance and extrovert expression of Baroque art were as much reflections of the glory of creation as of the glory of human potential. And Buxtehude was one of those in the forefront of bringing this style to its maturity, directly paving the way for the greatest master of the Baroque era and possibly the greatest composer of all time, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Mahler: None of their music would exist without Buxtehude.
But above and beyond his importance to music history, it’s worth reflecting how this composer bore witness to the union of art and life. When exploring the exciting world of early music, you could do a lot worse than to begin with Buxtehude.
Author’s Note: The subject and much of the information for this essay were suggested to me by Alexander Winkler, a scholar of Buxtehude currently living in Denmark and recently the author of Buxtehude: The Musical Visionary Who Inspired J.S. Bach.
*This essay was first published at The Imaginative Conservative and is republished here with gracious permission.
Related Posts
