Tercentenary Buxtehude

In 1987 the first edition of Kerala Snyder's monograph on Buxtehude was published, and it immediately became the standard work on the composer. Twenty years later, a revised edition has appeared to mark the tercentenary of the composer's death. A comparison of the two editions is a good way to appraise how scholarship on Buxtehude has advanced during the last two decades.

Superficially the second edition has many resemblances with the first. There is still the same number of chapters, and several have essentially the same wording. It is a testament to the quality of Snyder's work that her original text can stand largely unchanged. The book is structured similarly to a traditional life-and-works, although because of the relative lack of biographical documents about Buxtehude, the first four chapters survey his environment (in Denmark, Lübeck and further afield) rather than offer a narrative of his life. Many useful insights still emerge, for instance into Buxtehude's links with other musicians, the funding arrangements of his Abendmusiken concerts in Lübeck, and (in his choice of godparents for his seven daughters) his relations with wider Lübeck society. Later chapters survey Buxtehude's music by genre, enriched by many musical examples and references to the music and theory of his contemporaries. The final three chapters survey the sources of his music, advance a possible chronology of his output, and address questions of performance practice.

Many of the changes in this second edition stem from the discovery of new sources. Most important of these is the unearthing in 2006 by Michael Maul and Peter Wollny of the Weimar organ tablature, containing J. S. Bach's copy of Buxtehude's organ fantasia on Nun freut euch lieben Christen gmein (BuxWV 210). Probably made in c.1698-9, the incomplete copy testifies to the circulation of Buxtehude's works in central Germany, and to Bach's knowledge of Buxtehude's music well before his famous trip to Lübeck in 1705. 'That the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Bach was copying — and presumably playing — such an ambitious work provides the best evidence yet found of the early development of his prodigious skills.' (p.323). Snyder also uses various documents returned to Lübeck since the end of the Cold War. These include the soprano partbook for a late 17th-century manuscript hymnal from Lübeck (illuminating the versions of the chorale melodies used by Buxtehude) and the account books for the Marienkirche from 1686 onwards (which shed light on repairs to the organs, leading Snyder to retract her previous hypothesis that they were retuned to Werckmeister III in 1683).

Snyder also grapples with new theories about Buxtehude and his music. One of the most thought-provoking is the suggestion, made separately by Ibo Ortgies and Siegbert Rampe, that Buxtehude notated his pedaliter keyboard pieces not with the intention of playing them on the organs of the Marienkirche, but 'as models in the teaching of improvisation and composition, which was done not in the church but at a stringed keyboard instrument in the teacher's home' (p.229). Such a hypothesis stems partly from the conundrum that many of Buxtehude's pieces are 'not readily playable on a mean-tone organ without subsemitones and with a short octave in the bass' (p.229). Despite these problems posed by tuning and compass, Snyder asserts that 'Buxtehude's written-down praeludia ... must reflect the music that he played on the St Mary's organs' (p.230). 'At the organ he would have adapted [the themes and organisational plans of his pieces] to the limitations of his instruments, whatever they were', although she believes his performances of his praeludia would not have 'strayed very far from the versions that have been transmitted to us' (pp.231-2).

Snyder also discusses Heinrich Schwab's new interpretation of Voorhout's Häusliche Musikszene, which probably is the only known portrait of Buxtehude (see illus.2 in Peter Holman's article in this issue). Although previously Buxtehude had been identified as...