Program Notes: Jan. 28 Great Organ Music at Yale with Bine Bryndorf

• Heinrich Scheidemann (1596–1663), Praeambulum in G Major, WV 73
• Heinrich Scheidemann, Dic nobis Maria, WV 51
• Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621), Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott, SwWV 303
• Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637–1707), La Capricciosa, BuxWV 250
• Heinrich Scheidemann, Benedicam Dominum in omni tempore, WV 48
• Dieterich Buxtehude, Toccata in F, BuxWV 156

Improvisation was the special province of the so-called North German organ school, which stemmed from Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck in the late 1500s and reached its pinnacle a century and a half later in the towering genius of Johann Sebastian Bach. All three organist-composers represented on tonight’s program were, first and foremost, master improvisers. As a young journeyman organist in Arnstadt, Bach made an arduous journey to Lübeck in 1705 to glean the secret of the art from the venerable Dieterich Buxtehude. Some fifty years earlier Buxtehude had made a similar pilgrimage to Hamburg to study with Heinrich Scheidemann, one of Sweelinck’s star pupils. That Sweelinck, a Dutchman, was the founding father of the North German school is less surprising when one considers the close ties of trade and culture that linked Hamburg to the Netherlands. The musicologist Pieter Dirksen notes that in the late sixteenth century a group of Hamburg merchants bought a chapel in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk, where Sweelinck was organist, and eventually established a thriving Lutheran community in the heart of Calvinist Holland. A significant number of Sweelinck’s students hailed from the Hanseatic city on the Baltic, soon to become the center of North German organ music, and they may have introduced him to Lutheran chorales like Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott.

Heinrich Scheidemann, Praeambulum in G, WV 73

Scheidemann served for some thirty-five years as organist of St. Catherine’s Church in Hamburg, where his liturgical duties included improvising preludes, or praeambula, on the church’s outstanding four-manual organ built by Friedrich Stellwagen and enlarged by Gottfried Fritzsche in the early 1630s. (Virtually destroyed during World War II, the instrument was recently reconstructed using pipes salvaged from the original instrument.) The Praeambulum in G is a particularly elaborate specimen of the genre, notable not only for its exceptional length but for its prominent and highly active pedal part. The short introduction, featuring a placid theme that climbs stepwise over the span of a fifth, soon gives way to an extended central section in which fugal writing alternates with passages based on sequences (motives repeated at different pitch levels). At the tail end, Scheidemann divides the pedal part into two voices, rendering the final G-major cadence all the more sonorously majestic.

Heinrich Scheidemann, Dic nobis Maria, WV 51

Giovanni Bassano composed his sprightly Resurrection motet Dic nobis Maria (Tell us, Mary) in 1599 for the celebrated cori spezzati, or divided choirs, at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. (Choral performances of Bassano’s work and Praetorius’s Benedicam Dominum in omni tempore will precede the respective chorale variations on our concert.) In reenvisioning the music for organ, Scheidemann used the melody as a harmonic scaffolding for richly embellished variations that highlighted the contrasting sonorities of the Stellwagen organ’s two main manuals. (Since Hamburg’s principal churches shared a single choir, funded by the city, their resident organists were frequently called upon to improvise keyboard versions of motets when singers were unavailable.) Scheidemann’s interest in variation form was sparked by Sweelinck, for whom it was something of a specialty, as the next piece on the program will illustrate. Although his intabulation (arrangement) slightly reduces the six-voice texture of the original motet, the final section preserves the charming echo effects associated with the spatially separated choirs at St. Mark’s.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott, SwWV 303

Known to his contemporaries as the “Orpheus of Amsterdam,” Sweelinck was still a teenager when he succeeded his father as organist of the Oude Kerk, a prestigious post he held until 1621. Over the course of those four decades his influence spread throughout northern Europe via his far-flung network of pupils: at one point, Scheidemann was one of four Sweelinck alumni serving simultaneously as organists of Hamburg’s Hauptkirchen. Sweelinck’s musical outlook was as international as his roster of students. A friend of John Bull and other English virginalist composers, he cultivated the characteristically English genre of sets of variations, or divisions, on both sacred and secular melodies. Although Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott (Have mercy, O my Lord) is based on a well-known Lutheran chorale, the Calvinist ban on liturgical music meant that it would have been heard only on the daily recitals that Sweelinck played before and after services.

Sweelinck arranges his six variations in three linked pairs, across which the slow-moving chorale melody migrates from voice to voice as an ever-present cantus firmus, anchoring the composer’s flights of increasingly fanciful and complex coloratura. The German term Kolorierung, denoting both coloration and ornamentation, seems apt in reference to Sweelinck’s imaginative use of figuration, texture, harmony, and registration to create a wide spectrum of tone colors. Variations 3 and 4 are especially sonorous, with the pedal intoning the sturdy chorale theme first in the tenor and then in the bass. The outer pairs of variations are scored for manuals only, and Sweelinck ramps up the virtuosic element in variation 6 with racing triplet figures, repeated notes, and wide leaps. In the end, the penitential atmosphere of Psalm 51, the source of the chorale’s text, is left far behind.                         

Dieterich Buxtehude, La Capricciosa, BuxWV 250

The leading North German composer of his time, Buxtehude served for four decades as organist of St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck, an important position analogous to the one Bach would occupy in mid-eighteenth-century Leipzig. Like St. Catherine’s in Hamburg, St. Mary’s—a prototype of Germany’s distinctive “brick Gothic” ecclesiastical architecture–was heavily bombed in World War II, reducing its two ancient and historically significant organs to smithereens. (Both have since been replaced by modern instruments.) Like Bach, Buxtehude was more than a church musician: as Lübeck’s de facto municipal music director, he introduced the city’s culturally aspiring burghers to quasi-operatic dramatic works on sacred themes, which he presented at St. Mary’s on five Sunday evenings of the year in a famous concert series billed as Abendmusiken. Also like Bach, he was a virtuoso harpsichordist and composed a wide range of music in secular genres.

La Cappriciosa, a set of thirty-two bravura variations on a dance-like tune, epitomizes Buxtehude’s popular touch. Although he described the theme as una aria d’inventione—a melody of his own invention—it is instantly recognizable as the bergamasca, an Italian folk dance whose simple but catchy harmonic scheme (I-IV-V-I) appealed to many composers of the period. Among them was Bach, who featured a bergamasca in the last of his Goldberg Variations. (The similarities between the two works are so conspicuous that some scholars see Bach’s late masterpiece as a gesture of homage to the idol of his youth.) Despite the idiomatic character of the harpsichord writing, La Cappriciosa lends itself to performance on the organ. Either way, Buxtehude’s tour de force attests to his formidable prowess as an executant. In the words of musicologist Kerala Snyder, “One can imagine Buxtehude himself playing this piece in the parlor of one of Lübeck’s patrician homes on the new harpsichord just purchased by one of his patrons, perhaps on a business trip to Antwerp.”

Heinrich Scheidemann, Benedicam Dominum in omni tempore, WV 48

Another of Scheidemann’s dozen extant organ intabulations (there were undoubtedly many others that he didn’t write down), Benedicam Dominum in omni tempore (I will bless the Lord at all times) is based on Hieronymus Praetorius’s six-voice setting of a text from Psalm 33. Praetorius’s lengthy tenure as organist of Hamburg’s St. James Church ended with his death in 1629, shortly after Scheidemann took up his post at St. Catherine’s, and it seems likely that the two men were personally acquainted. Scheidemann was clearly drawn to his colleague’s Venetian-inspired polychoral motets. His treatment of Benedicam Dominum is considerably freer in style than Dic nobis Maria and lighter in sonority, dispensing as it does with a pedal part. Scheidemann’s intricate, varied, densely interwoven figurations mirror Praetorius’s imitative vocal writing, and the mixture of polyphony and homophony is carefully calibrated to express the jubilant character of the unsung chorale text. 

Dieterich Buxtehude, Toccata in F, BuxWV 156

In addition to his secular variation sets and suites, Buxtehude composed dozens of independent keyboard pieces more suitable for performance in church. Most of them, like the exhilarating Toccata in F, contain an obligatory pedal part and were thus clearly conceived for organ. Buxtehude’s standard procedure in such works was to juxtapose free-flowing, rhapsodic sections with passages in a stricter fugal style. The resulting contrast of texture and affect was calculated to show off the variety of tone colors available on the fifty-two-stop main organ at St. Mary’s. As Snyder notes, the pedal division alone had fifteen stops, accounting for its prominence in the Toccata. Above all, Buxtehude’s work exemplifies the improvisatory spontaneity associated with the so-called “fantastic style” (stylus phantasticus), which the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher described in 1650 as “the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing, neither to words, nor to a harmonic subject.”

Notes © by Harry Haskell

A regular program annotator for New York’s Carnegie Hall and Metropolitan Opera and the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, Harry Haskell is the author of The Early Music Revival: A History and editor of The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. In Her Own Wright, his podcast about the Wright Brothers’ sister Katharine, is available on iTunes and other outlets.