Music Notes for Sunday, February 16, 2025

Music for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

Praeludium in D major (BuxWV 139) – Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707)

Dieterich Buxtehude was a Danish or German organist and composer of church music, one of the most esteemed and influential composers of his time. Buxtehude settled at Lübeck in 1688 as organist of St Mary’s church. There he gained such fame as a composer that the city became a mecca for musicians of northern Germany. The young Handel visited him in 1703, and in 1705 young Bach walked more than 200 miles to see him. Both young men hoped to succeed the master at Lübeck, but marriage to one of his daughters was a condition and each found this unacceptable.

Buxtehude’s most important and influential works are considered to be those for organ. The Praeludium in D major, this Sunday’s organ postlude in church, opens with a twenty-bar introduction whose extemporary style might suggest an organist exploring an unfamiliar instrument before settling to his task. There follows a four-voice fugue on a subject in which a repeated note prominently features; a sustained passage in which Buxtehude demonstrates a knowledge of complex harmony; and the lively, toccata-like section (interrupted by another sustained passage) with which the piece concludes. Thus ‘prelude and fugue’, the phrase commonly used to describe such works by Buxtehude, is not entirely apt, for instead of a clear-cut division into two substantial movements of more or less equal length, there is a succession of relatively short passages, strict fugal writing alternating with sections of an improvisatory character, some of them lively and harmonically straightforward, some stately and harmonically complex.

Gerald Harder