PROGRAM Not e s
Dieterich Buxtehude
Detail of Musical Company by Johannes Voorhout (1674) of a viol player believed to be Dieterich Buxtehude
Membra Jesu nostri: Passion music of the seventeenth century The music of the seventeenth century is distinguished by a fascinating delight in experimentation and innovation, the boldness of which can still impress us today. Around and after 1600, numerous new genres emerged that were to mold the ensuing decades and even centuries. Composers discovered spatial effects and developed the foundations of a functional harmony with which large-scale formal relationships could be constructed; they recognized both the effectiveness of solo singing accompanied by polyphonic instruments alone and the beguiling splendor of large vocal and instrumental ensembles. And, last but not least, they learned to harness the dramatic power of human emotions for musical purposes and to portray them both on stage—in the opera—and in the ecclesiastical sphere—in the oratorio. Given the plethora of discoveries and developments that accompanied this virtually allencompassing renewal of the art of composition, it is surprising that attempts to depict the Passion of Christ in music appeared only relatively late and with a certain hesitancy. Instead, organists, choirmasters, and music directors—especially in the Protestant territories north of the Alps— remained faithful to the antiquated genre of the responsorial Passion, which had still barely crossed the threshold between liturgical practice and learned vocal style. 2 021–20 22 Se aso n
The reasons for this reticence are complex. First of all, since the Middle Ages the singing of the Passion story had been the domain of the liturgist in the sanctuary. Secondly, there was a dread of any hint of a dramatization of the Passion, which proved very difficult to overcome. Lutheran theologians immediately scented the infiltration of proscribed Roman Catholicism and feared that the licentiousness (and moral dubiousness) of opera might find its way into the most sacred realms of faith. In many places it was not until the second decade of the eighteenth century that largescale oratorio passions by such composers as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann could be heard. In the seventeenth century, other solutions were devised. As this program’s works by Dieterich Buxtehude and Heinrich Schütz show, the Passion narrative was set to music indirectly and in a decidedly undramatic context. The music collection of Gustav Düben (ca. 1628–1690), music director to the Swedish court, which is now in the Uppsala University Library, preserves the autograph manuscript of a seven-part cycle of Passion cantatas by Dieterich Buxtehude, organist of the Marienkirche in Lübeck, entitled Membra Jesu nostri (literally, The limbs of our Jesus). The 11
