Setting: Communion Service in C – John Ireland
Motet: Verleih uns Frieden – Felix Meldelssohn
For more information about music at St. James’, visit the Service Music page and the Concerts page at www.stjames.bc.ca.
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Dieterich Buxtehude was a Danish organist and composer of the Baroque period. During his long career as organist at Lubeck’s Marienkirche, 1668-1707, he came to epitomize the great North German organ school. As a composer who worked in various vocal and instrumental idioms, Buxtehude’s style greatly influenced other composers, such as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. The 20-year-old Bach walked over four hundred kilometers from Arnstadt to visit the great master, which says everything about how important Buxtehude’s music was to the young Bach. Buxtehude is considered one of the most important composers of the 17th century.
The Praeludium in E minor (BuxWV143), this Sunday’s organ postlude in church, begins with a pedal solo whose material generates most of the introduction’s twenty bars. The first of the fugal sections is based on one of the shortest and most unusual of Buxtehude’s subjects (eight notes, but only three pitches). The last of its pedal entries is followed by a free episode and then by a second fugue whose subject is a triple-time variant of that of the first. A free Adagio coming to rest over a long-held tonic pedal brings the work to a grand conclusion.
Gerald Harder