The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 26 (2020) No. 1

Dietrich Buxtehudes geistliche Vokalwerke: Texte, Formen, Gattungen. By Olga Gero. Studia musicologica Upsaliensia, nova series 26. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2016. [427 pp. ISBN 978-91-554-9691-3.]

Reviewed by Paul Walker*

1.1 The title and subtitle of this book lead us to expect an exploration of Buxtehude’s vocal music that focuses on categorization and comparison: where the texts come from, what the formal procedures are that the composer turns to in setting them, and how the body of works can be organized by genre. Since this task has largely been accomplished to the widespread satisfaction of the scholarly community by Kerala Snyder in her life-and-works volume Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck, one wonders what Olga Gero has to tell us that will further our understanding of this music. She lays out her goal on pp. 17–19 of the Introduction.

1.2 She appears to be motivated first and foremost by two scholarly strands with which she (rightly, I would add) takes issue: (1) the opinion, first expressed over a century ago by Philipp Spitta, that Buxtehude’s vocal works lack the compositional and structural sophistication of his organ music largely due to the ubiquity of short sections in ever-changing time signatures, and (2) the long-standing  penchant of scholars for focusing mostly if not exclusively on the so-called Figurenlehre to explain this music. To accomplish her mission of laying these two strands to rest, the author proposes to focus on individual works “in contrast to the systemizing tendency of music-rhetorical figures,” to place emphasis on hermeneutic, philological, and empirical methods, and to bring in methodologies from art history and literary criticism. The result will show, she promises, that Buxtehude developed  “a concept of the vocal work whose music tries to give the overall affect (Gesamtaffect) of the text, often in a form independent of the textual model.”

1.3 This is a laudable goal, one that we would all like to see met, but it turns out not to be the whole story. In a final three-page summary (Ausblick) at the very end (pp. 327–30), we read that the impulse behind the detailed investigation of the relationship between words and music lies in the question of compositional process: can the composer’s working methods in setting a text to music be traced and can his understanding of that text be known? This goal is probably best labeled “ambitious,” and in any case not the same as describing and finding meaning in the individual pieces. Before we even begin to delve into the body of the book, then, we are faced with three different and to some extent contradictory sets of expectations: a title focused on organization of the body of works, an introduction focused on a close reading of the pieces, and a conclusion focused on the composer’s compositional process and decision-making.

1.4 It is little wonder, then, that Gero struggles to give us a consistent narrative that proposes a thesis and proceeds to demonstrate it. The problems can be seen already in the book’s organization. She has divided her material into three large groups, each identified with a Roman numeral. In broad outline these match the three items of the book’s subtitle: Part I focuses on texts, Part II on genres, and Part III on compositional methods (Schreibweise) and style (i.e., loosely related to forms). The third is by far the longest, and ranges widely and meanderingly through topics that include categories of musical repetition, uses of musical texture, sub-units of text in a piece, the use of instruments, the possibilities of Italian models, and more. One searches in vain for a section devoted to close readings of several pieces, much less any sort of grappling with what we might be able to discern of Buxtehude’s compositional decision-making. Instead, we get a series of interesting topics in no particular order and with no sense of progress toward an important finding that will change our thinking about Buxtehude as a composer of vocal music.

1.5 Along the way, the author forces the conscientious reader to work very hard to ferret out information. For instance, on p. 30 we learn that Gero has turned up three new sources for texts set by Buxtehude. This is exciting news, except that I am still not sure what they all are. I know what two of them are: a Precationes liturgiae in dies VII. digestae of 1546 and a Precationum piarum enchiridion. I believe that the third one is a set of copper engravings by Anton II. Wierix with accompanying text, but this source is presented beginning on p. 68 with no reference linking it with the first two, described almost forty pages earlier. On p. 38 we learn that Buxtehude’s poetic texts can be ordered into different thematic groups. The following sentence then tells us that “Three of them [the poetic texts? the groups?] stand in direct dialogue with the Holy Scriptures—the Old and New Testament:” What follows this colon, however, is a list with eight bullet points. What the three things are remains a mystery.

1.6 At the beginning of Part III (p. 114), Gero introduces her two categories of sectional repetition in this music, which she names Rahmenform (form based on frames) and Refrainform. There follow almost immediately two very detailed lists, one for each category, with the various pieces assigned to each category and sub-category, but no clear definitional distinction between the two principal divisions. (Instead, we get descriptions of the several subtypes.) In my role as conscientious reviewer, I spent considerable time looking at the various pieces in each category trying to understand what the differences were, only to encounter, finally, fifteen pages later (p. 129), the needed definitions. Equally maddening is the presence of a full eleven appendices, to which, in the course of the book, almost no reference is made. The reader, in other words, must try to remember to look there for possible information about whatever the topic at hand might be.

1.7 The prose has a certain stream-of-consciousness element to it that tends to thwart any sort of purposeful narrative. This tendency also leads us down paths that really are not relevant for the topic. For instance, a long section on the so-called Rhythmica Oratio, the long Latin poem from which Buxtehude drew for his Membra Jesu nostri, devotes several pages to the two most important German translations, by Martin Opitz and Paul Gerhardt. Alas, Buxtehude’s cantata cycle is entirely in Latin. A long section of seventeen pages on Laudate pueri Dominum, BuxWV 69, Buxtehude’s liturgical masterpiece for two sopranos and six gambas, leads the reader to expect the kind of close analysis promised in the Introduction, but most of the section is unfortunately given over to other settings of this Psalm from the Düben Collection by Samuel Capricornus, Francesco Foggia, Christian Geist, and Augustin Pfleger.

1.8 A great deal of attention is paid to the two formal categories mentioned above, and here we find much useful information, but there is one enormous elephant in the room. As all musicians conversant with seventeenth-century music know, the principal element of sectional repetition at the time was ritornello form, and nowhere does Gero seriously grapple with the relationship between it, on the one hand, and her Rahmenform and Refrainform, on the other. The just-mentioned Laudate pueri Dominum again serves to illustrate the problem. The author classifies it as Da-Capo-Form (Instrumental), that is, with an opening instrumental movement or section that returns at the end, but of course what returns in this piece is the opening ritornello, which meanwhile makes several additional appearances in the course of the piece, as ritornellos are wont to do. Why, then, is this not a Refrain Form, since one manifestation of that form includes “an instrumental interlude, designated ritornello, that is brought in between Aria Strophes” (p. 126)? We are not told.

1.9 In the end, the amount of new information and analytical enlightenment that I came away with seemed meager relative to the large amount of effort needed to acquire it. In any event, I do not feel any closer to getting inside Buxtehude’s head regarding his choice of texts and how he thought about setting them, or to the ways in which his vocal works can express affect in a whole-piece manner. Nor have I gained any particular insight into how it is that these pieces, with their short sections and frequent meter changes, hang together. And I still have little idea about his compositional process, which I suspect will remain largely unknowable.

1.10 The author clearly brings a great deal of passion to her subject. Perhaps, with this dissertation now out of the way, she is ready to write the book that she truly envisions and to grapple with the questions that engage her about this music. Buxtehude lovers eagerly await such a book.

^[*] Paul Walker (pwalker@nd.edu) is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. His latest book, Fugue in the Sixteenth Century, has just been published by Oxford University Press.