Dietrich Buxtehude is probably most familiar to modern
classical music audiences as the man who inspired the
young Johann Sebastian Bach to make a lengthy
pilgrimage to Lubeck, Buxtehude's place of employment
and residence for most of his life, just to hear
Buxtehude play the organ. But Buxtehude was a major
figure among German Baroque composers in his own right.
Though we do not have copies of much of the work that
most impressed his contemporaries, Buxtehude
nonetheless left behind a body of v...(+)
Dietrich Buxtehude is probably most familiar to modern
classical music audiences as the man who inspired the
young Johann Sebastian Bach to make a lengthy
pilgrimage to Lubeck, Buxtehude's place of employment
and residence for most of his life, just to hear
Buxtehude play the organ. But Buxtehude was a major
figure among German Baroque composers in his own right.
Though we do not have copies of much of the work that
most impressed his contemporaries, Buxtehude
nonetheless left behind a body of vocal and
instrumental music which is distinguished by its
contrapuntal skill, devotional atmosphere, and raw
intensity. He helped develop the form of the church
cantata, later perfected by Bach, and he was just as
famous a virtuoso on the organ.
The Passacaglia for organ in D minor, BuxWV 161, may
well be Dietrich Buxtehude's most famous piece of music
-- but that does not mean, sadly, that it is by any
stretch of the imagination well recognized. It is one
of three ostinato-oriented, ground bass organ pieces
(BuxWV 159-161; a related work is BuxWV 137, whose
brief final section is a chaconne) in which Buxtehude
refocused the lens of his quintessentially north-German
organ art to look at the Spanish-Italian chaconne and
passacaglia forms -- forms hitherto foreign to
mainstream German organ music. Like nearly all of
Buxtehude's music, BuxWV 161 has to this point remained
undatable -- the best we can do is say that it was
probably composed during his 40-year tenure as organist
at the Marienkirche at Lübeck, a post he held from
1668 to his death in 1707.
In the Passacaglia, Buxtehude assigns the repeating
four-measure ground bass to the pedals, and allows the
two hands to devise ever more elaborate filigree --
here contrapuntally ordered, there made into more
obviously virtuoso stuff -- to go above it. Buxtehude
builds a four-section plan from the modulations through
which he puts the ground bass (D minor - F major - A
minor - D minor); each section is exactly 30 measures
in length, with a one-measure "fill" separating
neighboring sections. It is easy to recognize, when
encountering such an unwaveringly precise but
flexible-sounding architecture, the extent to which
such works as the Passacaglia influenced Buxtehude's
spiritual descendent J.S. Bach, who is of course famed
for his intricate and sometimes mathematical structural
layouts, and who as a young man traveled some 200 miles
on foot so that he might hear Buxtehude play.
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