John Scott’s hands. Mr. Scott’s concerts will be a tribute to Dietrich Buxtehude on the 300th anniversary of his death.
In March 2005 nine students from Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa., along with a teacher, a chaperone and the chaperone’s young son, walked some 33 miles over three days, from New Brunswick, N.J., to Manhattan. It was around the time of Bach’s birthday, on the 21st, and they were loosely commemorating the 300th anniversary of Bach’s 250-mile hike from Arnstadt in central Germany to Lübeck in the north to hear the master organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude perform.
It was an odd but touching tribute, the journey truncated to fit neatly into the academic schedule. It ended even more anomalously. Having reached their destination, the pilgrims attended a performance, but — there being no Buxtehude at hand — it was a concert of Mendelssohn by the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall.
If the Moravian students, or anyone else, were to make a similar journey this spring, they could crown their exertions with the real thing, music by a charming and imaginative composer whose influence extended from Bach to Brahms and beyond. Over 10 Saturdays, beginning tomorrow and continuing sporadically through late May, John Scott, the organist and director of music at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, will present all the surviving organ works of Buxtehude (pronounced book-steh-HOO-deh) on the church’s magnificent Taylor & Boody organ, built in 1996 in a style emulating those of north Germany and the Netherlands in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The appropriateness of that instrument was one reason for embarking on a Buxtehude festival, said Mr. Scott, an Englishman who took the St. Thomas position in 2004 and had performed a similar survey on the organ at the huge St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. “It is fair to say that that instrument was not ideally suited to this repertory,” Mr. Scott said.
The other catalyst for the series, he said, was the 300th anniversary of the death of Buxtehude on May 9 of this year. Mr. Scott is not the only one to commemorate the occasion. The American organist James David Christie has been presenting a similar survey of Buxtehude’s organ works in eight programs at both the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass., and at Harvard. Those recitals began in September and end in April.
Dieterich Buxtehude — to adopt the spelling of his first name from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians — was born in Helsingborg, then in Denmark, now in Sweden, in 1637. Or so it is generally accepted. Then again, to stick with New Grove, he might have been born in Oldesloe, Germany, around — not necessarily in — 1637.
The family was German, probably stemming originally from the town of Buxtehude, but Buxtehude’s father was an organist first in Helsingborg and then in Elsinore, Denmark, where Dieterich was raised. Buxtehude himself worked as an organist in Helsingborg and Elsinore cities before settling in Lübeck, where he worked at the Marienkirche from 1668 to his death in 1707. This was one of the most prominent and prestigious musical posts in Germany, and Buxtehude achieved great renown.
Handel visited him in 1703, and Bach took his famous hike two years later “to learn one thing and another about his art,” according to the records of his Arnstadt employers. Having been granted a four-week leave, Bach stayed about four months.
As Mr. Scott said, “He obviously found something he couldn’t pull away from,” whatever unpleasant consequences might have awaited him on his return to Arnstadt.
Bach was undoubtedly influenced by Buxtehude’s vocal and choral music, though he went far beyond it. Buxtehude’s famous Passion work, “Membra Jesu Nostri,” has appeared on two CDs in time for the anniversary: one by Jos van Veldhoven and the Netherlands Bach Society on Channel Classics; the other by Konrad Junghänel and Cantus Cölln on Harmonia Mundi France. It is a striking creation, meditating on Jesus’ crucifixion by way of various suffering body parts: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart and face. But it sounds modest and antiquated in relation to the heights to which Bach took vocal and choral writing, and that impression carries through the other Buxtehude works on the discs.
His organ works are something else. The casual listener might well mistake fleeting moments for Bach. Mr. Scott spoke of the “flamboyant rhetorical style” that Bach probably drew from Buxtehude, and Mr. Christie said that “some Bach pieces indisputably owe their legacy to Buxtehude.”
One head-turning convergence comes in Buxtehude’s Passacaglia in D minor, in which the slow repeating theme is remarkably similar in its opening contour to that of Bach’s in his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Either Bach or Buxtehude or both might have modeled the theme after one by the French composer André Raison, though Mr. Christie is dubious.
In any case the themes are put to widely divergent uses. Whereas Buxtehude leaves the head of his theme as a sort of open-ended question, imparting a certain speed and urgency to his piece, Bach goes on to supply a response. Proceeding placidly in complete sentences, as it were, Bach achieves a monumentality that Buxtehude, who generally worked on a smaller scale, does not seek.
Mr. Scott pointed out some of Buxtehude’s innovations. A Prelude in C, for example, begins with an extended solo passage for pedals. “Buxtehude changed the course of organ writing in one single gesture,” Mr. Scott said. Then too there are works for manuals without pedals, in which Mr. Scott finds “a more learned, elegant style.”
For all the pleasure Buxtehude’s organ works offer the listener, they present special problems for the performer, because they do not come down in original manuscripts, let alone printed editions, but in copies by his students, probably based on his improvisations or theirs. Mr. Christie, who has performed all of Bach’s organ works in a series, said that Buxtehude’s presented a greater challenge, requiring more conjecture and fantasy.
“You have to treat each work as a great new experience, as if you were playing it for the first time,” said Mr. Christie, who is an adviser for a new critical edition of Buxtehude’s organ works. “If you don’t play them that way every time, you’ve missed the boat.”
It is a busy season for Mr. Scott, who, on Jan. 28, will play a program of works by Gyorgy Ligeti and Jonathan Harvey in the first of two concerts presented at St. Thomas by the Miller Theater of Columbia University. (Kevin Bowyer performs the second, on Feb. 11.)
And it is a busy season for the organ generally in New York, as Kent Tritle concludes a midwinter organ festival on the splendid Mander instrument at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Sunday, performing with Joseph Alessi, the principal trombonist of the New York Philharmonic.
New York has long had a good supply of fine organs. Now with the additions of recent decades and with a good supply of enterprising organists, it promises to become an organ capital worth a listener’s journey, if not necessarily on foot.
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