The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 15 (2009) No. 1

Buxtehude’s Free Organ Works

Die freien Orgelwerke Dieterich Buxtehudes: Überlieferungsgeschichtliche und stilkritische Studien. 3rd ed. By Michael Belotti. Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 36, Musikwissenschaft, 136. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004. [333 pp. ISBN 3-631-50170-6.]

Kerala J. Snyder*

1. Introduction

2. The Transmission of Buxtehude’s Free Organ Works

3. Belotti’s “Corrected and Enlarged” Edition of Die freien Orgelwerke

4. Belotti’s Critical Studies of Style

5. Conclusions

References

Figures

1. Introduction

1.1 Just as the lives of important composers call forth new biographies every few decades, so too do their works require periodic examination and reevaluation. Michael Belotti has done this for a small but extremely important segment of the oeuvre of Dieterich Buxtehude: his free organ works, numbered 136 through 176 and 225 in the Buxtehude-Werke-Verzeichnis.¹ The book under review, published in 2004, is the third corrected and expanded edition of the author’s 1993 Ph.D. dissertation from Freiburg (Breisgau) University, first published in 1995. (I have not seen the second edition, which appeared in 1997.) There is yet a fourth version of some of the material contained in this book: Belotti’s Commentary to his critical edition of the pedaliter free works (BuxWV 136–161), published in 1998 as volume 15B of Buxtehude’s Collected Works.² This version offers Belotti’s most accessible discussion of the sources for this smaller group of works, but for similar information on the sources of the manualiter works and stylistic studies for the entire group, one must consult Die freien Orgelwerke. As its complete title suggests, Belotti places his main emphasis on the transmission history of these works (Part 1, pp. 5–194). His critical studies of style (Part 2, pp. 195–308) concentrate on the pedaliter praeludia, problems of authenticity, and aspects of chronology.

2. The Transmission of Buxtehude’s Free Organ Works

2.1 Philipp Spitta initiated the study of Buxtehude’s free organ works and their sources in his Bach biography of 1873 and two years later in the first complete edition of those known at the time, which then numbered only twenty-four works in ten sources.³ He took as his principal source D-B Mus. ms. 2681 (henceforth B 2681), which contains fourteen free works, both pedaliter and manualiter, including some of Buxtehude’s most famous praeludia, among them those in D major (BuxWV 139), D minor (BuxWV 140), E minor (BuxWV 142), and G minor (BuxWV 149). Spitta recognized that three other manuscripts were closely related to B 2681 and constructed a stemma to demonstrate their relationship (Figure 1), which he characterized as “not very gratifying” (“kein sehr erfreuliches”).⁴ Since no autograph sources for Buxtehude’s organ works survive, no one to this day would contest Spitta’s grim assessment of their extant sources, although their number and our understanding of them have grown considerably.

2.2 By the time Spitta’s student Max Seiffert issued a revised edition in 1903, four new sources and one new work had come to light. Following the discovery of the Lowell Mason Codex at Yale University, which serves as the unique source for seven Buxtehude works, Seiffert issued an “Ergänzungsband” in 1939 that brought the total number of free works to thirty-two. These form the corpus of volumes I and II of the combined Spitta-Seiffert edition, issued in 1952 with an introduction by Walter Kraft and circulating widely in reprints by Kalmus and Dover. The discovery of the Lund tablatures, which uniquely transmit seven more works, brought the list of Buxtehude’s free organ works nearly to the state in which we now know it. Joseph Hedar discussed them all in his dissertation; for his complete edition (1952) he took the ten Lund manuscripts as his principal source, but for those works not found in Lund he continued to rely on Spitta and Seiffert.⁵

2.3 Klaus Beckmann was the first scholar since Spitta to undertake a thorough philological investigation of the manuscripts transmitting Buxtehude’s organ music, the results of which for the free works he published in the critical report of volume 1 of the “scholarly edition” of his Sämtliche Orgelwerke in 1971.⁶ Several of the sources had been lost during World War II, but some were preserved in photocopies, and one important member of the B 2681 family, a manuscript copied by the Bach student Johann Friedrich Agricola, had surfaced in the library of the Brussels Conservatory (B-Bc 26659).⁷ Spitta and Seiffert had known of it only through a now-lost copy by A. G. Ritter. Beckmann lists this manuscript (with his siglum E¹) as the progenitor of a source family separate from B 2681 (his D¹). Three members of his E-family (D-B Am 462, (D-B  Am 430, and B 2681/1) had appeared on Spitta’s stemma as descendents of Y (see Figure 1). Soon after Beckmann’s 1971 publication, a new source with one new work emerged: a canzonetta in A minor, which Beckmann published with the BuxWV number 225 in a reprinting of the “practical edition” of his Sämtliche Orgelwerke in 1973, just in time to make it into the first edition of the Buxtehude-Werke-Verzeichnis (1974).⁸

2.4 By the late 1980s, with the appearance of three new manuscripts and the reappearance of three others that had been previously thought lost, the time was ripe for a reappraisal of the free organ works and their sources. Belotti took on this task, together with preparing his edition of the free pedaliter works for the Collected Works. He describes each of the main sources in detail, and one of the new manuscripts, the “Werndt” manuscript (D-DS  1462/1) became the principal source for his edition of the Praeludium in F-sharp minor (BuxWV 146). The older of two manuscripts found at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh (US-Pc rQM 10) supplies a new source for the Praeludium in G minor (BuxWV 148). Hans-Joachim Schulze had examined this manuscript earlier and identified Johann Christian Bach as the principal scribe and the young Johann Sebastian Bach as a possible second copyist, and dated it about 1700.⁹ Belotti maintains the date of “1700 at the latest” (p. 112), but questions Schulze’s scribal identifications, on which his dating had depended, without supplying alternate evidence for the date. The recovery of a manuscript (now (PL-Kj 40295) that had once belonged to the Hamburg organist Heinrich Schmahl is significant because, with its date of 1696, it is the oldest tablature source for a keyboard work of Buxtehude (the Praeludium in A major, BuxWV 151). Its reading diverges sharply from Johann Christoph’s Bach’s copy of the work in the Möller manuscript, however. Belotti convincingly illuminates the problems in the transmission of this work (pp. 76–80) and draws on both sources for his edition.

2.5 Belotti’s most extensive discussion in this first part of the book concerns the B 2681 family of sources, particularly the Agricola manuscript (pp. 136–73). He demonstrates that Agricola copied the central portion of this manuscript directly from B 2681, copying just its pedaliter pieces in the same order while introducing his own corrections, including using red ink for the pedal part in his two-stave score. Belotti offers a new stemma (Figure 2) to illustrate this relationship, which departs from that of Spitta and, implicitly, Beckmann. Concordances in the newly discovered Pittsburgh sources help to illuminate the kinds of corrections that Agricola made. Despite Belotti’s best efforts, however, the scribe of B 2681 remains unidentified. He advances the hypothesis (p. 193) that this manuscript, which he dates as around 1720, represents the last redaction of a repertory of Buxtehude’s free works from the circle of Johann Pachelbel in Erfurt, and that this repertory grew no more after Pachelbel left the city in 1690.

3. Belotti’s “Corrected and Enlarged” Edition of Die freien Orgelwerke

3.1 Before moving to Part 2 of the book and a consideration of Belotti’s studies of style, it will be useful to survey some of the changes that he made from the first edition (1995) to the third (2004). At the very beginning, the later edition lacks the dedication of the first to “the memory of Philipp Spitta,” even though Belotti’s revised stemma for the B 2681 family had already appeared in the first edition. No new sources came to light during this period, so changes to Part 1 are minimal. In his very useful overview of the editions of Buxtehude’s free organ works and the sources available to their editors (pp. 14–15), he is able to add his own completed edition from 1998. The body of the third edition comprises only ten more pages, so a good portion of its enlargement comes in the bibliography and an added and welcome index.

3.2 Changes occur more frequently in Part 2. In the section on instrumental designation we read a most interesting insertion:

Teaching and practice took place not on the church organ but on the instrument in the home of the organist. As a rule this was a pedal clavichord. Esaias Hasse, the successor to Hans Buxtehude at St. Olai in Helsingør, possessed “1 Dobbelt ClauCordium med pedaler,” according to the inventory of his estate (p. 208).

In the earlier edition Belotti had spoken only of the harpsichord as an alternative to the organ for the manualiter compositions—and he still emphasizes it here—but at the end of this section he adds a parenthetical definition of a house instrument as “harpsichord or clavichord.”

3.3 In his section on temperament (pp. 268–92), a subdivision of the larger section “Aspects of Chronlogy,” Belotti replaces an existing paragraph with the following (p. 278):

To set up a chronology for the temperament of the Lübeck organs, whereby after 1641 D-sharp and after 1673 A-flat were usable, and in 1683 Werckmeister’s well-tempered system was introduced, would be highly speculative and hardly usable for the determination of the time of composition of the organ works. Through a study of the account books of the Marienkirche (now once again complete after a lengthy absence), Ibo Ortgies has come to the conclusion that the tuning work of the year 1683 was by no means abnormally long and a change in the temperament was unlikely. So this year should not be seen as a strict boundary in the discussion of chronology. It is certainly conceivable that Buxtehude was prompted by Werckmeister’s tuning schemes of 1681 to become involved with these questions; we must assume, however, that the kind of temperament that he might have liked for a particular piece was not available to him on the organs of St. Mary’s during his lifetime.

3.4 As Belotti moves to a consideration of the works of other composers with respect to temperament and keyboard compass, he observes in both editions that Vincent Lübeck [Sr.] never fully made use of the expanded pedal, with C-sharp and D-sharp,¹⁰ of the Schnitger organ that he played at St. Nicolai in Hamburg (p. 292). In the 2004 edition Belotti adds a footnote citing Siegbert Rampe’s 2003 edition of the works of Vincent Lübeck (senior and junior) and noting that Rampe “assumes that the organ works were intended primarily for teaching purposes.”

3.5 I single out these three changes because they demonstrate that while Belotti was preparing the third edition of his book he was drawing upon research that was in progress at the time and has since been published. Since two of these studies appeared in forms that are not normally reviewed, I would like to take the opportunity to do so here, however briefly.

3.6 Our appreciation of the importance of the pedal clavichord for instruction and practicing during this period has grown significantly since the publication of Joel Speerstra’s Bach and the Pedal Clavichord: An Organist’s Guide in 2004.¹¹ Although none of Speerstra’s earlier publications appear in Belotti’s bibliography, he must have been aware of the fact that Speerstra had built a historic reconstruction of Johann David Gerstenberg’s two manual and  pedal clavichord of 1760 and was using it successfully in his teaching at Göteborg University. Although this book is devoted primarily to the use of such instruments in the eighteenth century, Speerstra gives historical references to pedal clavichords from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries (pp. 20–23); Esaias Hasse’s instrument now adds one more to the list.

3.7 The hypothesis concerning the temperament of the St. Mary’s organs that Belotti had accepted in 1995 but rejects here was my own, published in 1985 and 1987 and based on research from the late 1970s.¹² At that time the account books of the church that had been kept in the former German Democratic Republic since the end of World War II were made available to me, but they extended only through 1685; the rest were presumed lost. My hypothesis was based on the fact that the longest period of organ tuning as measured by payments to the bellows treaders, 30½ days in 1683, occurred just two years after Werckmeister had published the first edition of his Orgelprobe, which contains the first description of the circulating temperament that we now call Werckmeister III.¹³ During the late 1980s these account books returned to Lübeck along with the later ones, which had been in the Soviet Union. During his dissertation research Ibo Ortgies examined all of them and found many later tunings that were even longer; they are summarized in Table 10, p. 107, of his dissertation, which he has published on the internet.¹⁴ He reaches the conclusion that prior to their tuning to equal temperament in 1782 (large organ) and 1805 (small organ), the St. Mary’s organs were tuned in quarter-comma mean tone.¹⁵ If this was true, Buxtehude would not have been able to play many of his finest organ works on them in the form in which the sources transmit them. Hans Davidsson has recently recorded all the Buxtehude organ works on the North German Baroque organ in Göteborg, which is tuned in quarter-comma meantone.¹⁶ But that organ is equipped with subsemitones, split black keys that give both D-sharp and E-flat, G-sharp and A-flat, and, on one manual, A-sharp and B-flat. To the best of our knowledge, the organs at St. Mary’s in Lübeck never had subsemitones.

3.8 Ortgies maintains that Buxtehude did not play the compositions that he had written down on the St. Mary’s organs:

The function of composed organ music in the highly professional realm lay by no means primarily in its performance but in its study for the development of the ability to improvise contrapuntally. Improvisation, contrapuntally correct and complex composing at the instrument, was the art of the organist, which found its learned counterpart in “the science of composition” in the study room. The science of composition created in its written-out works the necessary examples for the art of improvisation by professional organists.

To the extent that individual compositions were not playable on the organ, they could be tried out on pedal clavichords and harpsichords. Such instruments could offer keyboard compasses that were not available on most organs, and stringed keyboard instruments were more flexible in their temperaments.¹⁷

3.9 Siegbert Rampe arrived at a similar conclusion in a study that he published as an article in three installments, although its 191 pages could have constituted a book.¹⁸ His working hypothesis is that “the Protestant organ music of the 17^th and 18^th centuries originated primarily for didactic purposes and in practice or instruction was played primarily on the clavichord or pedal clavichord.”¹⁹ In the five parts of his study he examines the duties of organists in church services, organ examinations and concerts, existing works and their sources, organological problems of compass and temperament, and music for the education of organists. In the latter category he considers the costs of tuition, the content and duration of study, fees charged for the copying of music, and references to the use of the pedal clavichord in teaching, all extremely valuable information. It should be noted, however, that the one extant contract for teaching by an organist that Rampe offers specifies that instruction will also be given on the organ: in 1787 Johann Christian Kittel agreed to teach Christian Heinrich Rinck for one year, “for one hour each day the pure composition of music, both in playing on the clavier and the organ as well as in harmony.”²⁰ Rinck, incidentally, later became court organist at Darmstadt and assembled a very large music library, which Lowell Mason purchased from his estate, thus bringing three manuscripts containing works by Buxtehude to the United States.

4. Belotti’s Critical Studies of Style

4.1 Part 2 of Die freien Orgelwerke begins with an overview of the extensive literature devoted to this repertory (pp. 195–200), and Belotti wisely decides not to attempt another comprehensive study but rather to explore just a few themes with respect to the musical style of these works. He begins with a consideration of the “problem of functionality” (pp. 201–6). For what purpose did Buxtehude compose these works: for the liturgy? for concerts? for teaching? Given the fact that the organist performed his liturgical duties chiefly through improvisation, why did he write them down on paper? Not exclusively for teaching, says Belotti (p. 205), but also to represent himself as a master of his art. Belotti had already discussed these questions at greater length in the beginning of Part 1 under the heading “Conditions of Circulation.” In Part 2, he then turns his attention briefly to the question of instrumental designation; pedaliter and manualiter works are transmitted together in the sources, but are the manualiter works also for organ? Belotti favors the harpsichord for many of them, but, as noted above, the clavichord makes its appearance in this third edition.

4.2 Belotti’s main interest lies in the pedaliter works (BuxWV 136–161), and he devotes 36 pages to them: the pedaliter praeludium before Buxtehude, the elements of the Buxtehudian pedaliter praeludium, including texture, fugal technique, and overall form, and finally the treatment of the pedal. He finds a wide variety of ways in which Buxtehude used the pedal, including motion much slower than that of the hands, short interjections, motivic dialogue with the hands, fugal subjects that are particularly idiomatic to the pedal, pedal solos, and double-pedal technique, which is found in only three of his works (BuxWV 136, 139, 150). The Praeludium in C Major (BuxWV 137) forms a veritable compendium of Buxtehude’s pedal art, with its introductory pedal solo, motivic interplay, and idiomatic fugue subject (p. 239).

4.3 In a short section devoted to problems of authenticy, Belotti discusses three complete works and the fragment BuxWV 154. His argument that the Praeludium in F Major (BuxWV 144) is more likely a parody of Buxtehude’s Praeludium in A minor (BuxWV 153) by one of his students than an authentic work is quite convincing. In the Collected Works it appears in an Appendix (15B, 154–57) rather than with the main corpus of works (volume 15A). No similar model exists for the Praeludium in E minor (BuxWV 143), which Belotti also considers more likely a “document of the Buxtehude reception” (p. 256) than an authentic work, and in this case Belotti does not exclude it from the main part of his edition. His discussion of the Praeludium in C major (BuxWV 138) is perplexing in one respect: here (p. 258) and also earlier (p. 225) he refers to the archaic feature of “paired entrances” in the exposition of its first fugue, finding them contradictory to the subject itself, which is more forward-looking. As Belotti indicates, paired entrances are quite characteristic of Heinrich Scheidemann’s fugal expositions; the first two voices enter in close imitation and proceed for several measures before the next two voices appear. Buxtehude employs this technique in his Praeambulum in A minor (BuxWV 158), but I fail to find it in BuxWV 138; the four voices enter regularly at 1½-measure intervals from m. 23 to m. 29. In any event, Belotti ultimately accepts the work as authentic. He considers the 18-measure fragment of a Praeludium in B-flat major (BuxWV 154) more likely the work of one of Buxtehude’s students and consigns it to the Appendix in his edition.

4.4 Belotti begins his final extensive section, “Aspects of Chronology,” with a discussion of keyboard compasses in the various churches where Buxtehude worked. These present as thorny a problem for the performance of many Buxtehude keyboard works as does mean-tone tuning, because both organs at St. Mary’s in Lübeck lacked not only C-sharp and E-flat in both manuals and pedal, but F-sharp and G-sharp as well. Interestingly, the organ at St. Mary’s Helsingør, where Buxtehude served from 1660 to 1668, did have F-sharp and G-sharp in its pedal, but no d′, which Buxtehude frequently used and which was present in Lübeck. Belotti can only conclude that these limited pedalboard compasses are of little use for the chronology of Buxtehude’s composition (p. 268) but do demonstrate that he did not play his praeludia for the liturgy at St. Mary’s (p. 262).

4.5 Belotti’s chronology section continues with his discussion of temperament, which, as already noted, he modified in the third edition (p. 278) as a result of Ortgies’ research. His chronological conclusions stemming from it, however, did not change at all. His division of Buxtehude’s works into the categories “works that certainly originated before 1690,” “works that probably originated before 1690,” and “works that cannot be shown to have been transmitted before 1690” (pp. 301–3) remains identical, except that he now dates his subcategory for temperament “from the 1680s” instead of 1683.

4.6 The date of 1690 in Belotti’s chronological categories comes from the year in which Pachelbel left his position as organist of the Predigerkirche in Erfurt, when presumably “this phase of exchange between Thüringen and the north ended” (p. 193). Those works in B 2681 that do not have concordances in the Lowell Mason Codex or the Lund tablatures constitute most of Belotti’s middle category of “probably before 1690.” But Pachelbel himself did not demonstrate his familiarity with Buxtehude’s music until 1699, the year of his dedication of Hexachordum Apollinis to Buxtehude and Ferdinand Tobias Richter, and he did not cut off his contacts with Thüringen in 1690; Pachelbel worked in Gotha in 1692, and he performed at Johann Christoph Bach’s wedding in Ohrdruf in 1694. Johann Sebastian Bach’s copy of Buxtehude’s Nun freut euch lieben Christen gmein (BuxWV 210), which Michael Maul and Peter Wollny date around 1698, could emanate from a Buxtehude-Pachelbel connection, but not necessarily before 1690.²¹ This manuscript came to light only recently, and we can look forward to Belotti’s discussion of it in his forthcoming edition of Buxtehude’s chorale-based works within the Collected Works.²² Finally, if Pachelbel was at the center of an Erfurt dissemination of Buxtehude manuscripts, it is surprising that we find no similar traces from his students in Nuremberg, where he worked from 1695 until his death in 1706. So to date all the works in B 2681 thirty years before its copying seems a bit risky. Nearly every scholar who has dealt with this group of works, myself included, has tried to arrange them into a chronological order, but this goal remains as elusive as ever.

5. Conclusions

5.1 If one assumes with Belotti, Rampe, and Orgies that Buxtehude did not play many of his major keyboard compositions on the organs of the churches he served, either because they exceeded the limits of temperament and compass or because he only improvised during the church services and concerts that he played, then temperament and compass become much less relevant to the discussion of chronology, because presumably Buxtehude was working these compositions out on his own stringed keyboard instrument, probably a pedal clavichord with a complete bass octave and whatever tuning he wished to give it. But is this assumption valid? Buxtehude undoubtedly committed his compositions to paper in the comfort of his own home and used them as models for his teaching of improvisation and composition. I cannot imagine that this master of improvisation would then take that piece of paper to the organ loft with him to perform directly from it. But neither can I imagine that he never played these magnificent works, or something very much like them, on the organs of St. Mary’s in Lübeck. Once a composition was mapped out in his head, he could easily have adapted it to the limitations of the instrument that he was playing. Belotti, after all, titled his book “The Free Organ Works of Dieterich Buxtehude,” and both Ortgies and Rampe hedged their bets somewhat in the excerpts that I quoted above.

5.2 With respect to temperament, my hypothesis that the organs in St. Mary’s Lübeck were tuned to Werckmeister III in 1683 can no longer stand in light of the additional information we now have, but we still do not know exactly how these organs were tuned during Buxtehude’s day, and we never will. The only contract we have for the large organ states unequivocally that it was tuned to equal temperament in 1782.²³ This temperament marks one end of a tuning continuum that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extended back through many different circulating temperaments to modified and pure quarter-comma meantone. I do not wish to imply that the tuning of the organs at St. Mary’s moved through many different stages, only that we do not know the point on this continuum at which they were tuned during Buxtehude’s time. The only marker for pure mean tone, short of some document describing the precise tuning of the organ, would have been the presence of subsemitones. One of the most valuable contributions of Ortgies’ dissertation is his list of organs with subsemitones;²⁴ the organ in Lübeck’s smaller and less prestigious St. Aegidien Church had E-flat/D-sharp subsemitones in its Brustwerk,²⁵ but those in St. Mary’s had none.

5.3 The strongest part of Belotti’s Die freien Orgelwerke lies in his study of the sources of Buxtehude’s organ music and their relationships; following in the steps of Philipp Spitta and Klaus Beckmann, he has thrown much new light on them, and this book belongs in every research library. Belotti has now corrected and expanded his original dissertation twice, but it remains a dissertation. In fact, virtually all the monographs devoted to Buxtehude’s organ music—by Josef Hedar, Hans-Jakob Pauly, Lawrence Archbold, and now Belotti—are Ph.D. dissertations, works of scholarship addressed to an audience of academics.²⁶ The world of music still awaits a comprehensive treatment of Buxtehude’s organ music similar to that which Peter Williams gave to the organ music of Bach, with the attention to performance practice that we miss in Belotti’s book.²⁷ Meanwhile, organists will do better to buy his editions in The Collected Works, and listeners can delight in recent recordings such as those of Hans Davidsson and Bine Bryndorf, which are amply supplied with registrations and notes on the individual works.²⁸

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