H et idioom van Buxtehude vraagt een enorme creativiteit van de speler. Bij Bach kun je gewoon de nootjes spelen of het werk op een draaiorgel laten uitvoeren. Zelfs dan is het nog mooi. Buxtehude vraagt meer van de musicus. Het is heel theatrale muziek. Heel creatief, geestig en soms enorm macho. Hij kan heel deemoedig zijn in de koralen, om vervolgens in de orgelwerken weer flink uit te pakken. Al in zijn eerste periode, waarin hij nog voornamelijk in de middentoonstemming schrijft, is Buxtehude buitengewoon avontuurlijk. Hij schakelde over op de Werckmeister-stemming en dat leverde hem zowel harmonisch als melodisch een enorme vrijheid op. Hij durft het bijvoorbeeld aan om te beginnen met een lange pedaalsolo. Dat was ongehoord in die dagen. Hij was als een jazzimprovisator en de toehoorders lieten een vergelijkbaar enthousiasme horen. Mensen stonden in de kerk gewoon te klappen. Buxtehude is theater. Critici uit zijn tijd zeiden vaak dat Buxtehude geen opera hoefde te schrijven: de kerk is zijn theater.”
— Ton Koopman, interview with Paul Janssen, Tijdschrift Oude Muziek, 2007, Band 2, 23.
B uxtehude’s musical idiom demands enormous creativity from the player. In Bach, you can play the notes normally or allow the organ to do the work. Even then it is beautiful. Buxtehude asks more of the musician. It is quite theatrical music. Quite creative, lively and sometimes very ‘macho’. Buxtehude can be not quite humble in the chorale, and then ‘take it out’ in the organ part. Already in his first period, in which he writes yet mainly in a middle-tone mood, Buxtehude is extremely adventurous. He communicates with a masterwork-mood and that, for him, is a very harmonious, tuneful mode in which he exercises enormous compositional freedom. He dares to begin a piece for instance with a long pedal solo. That was outrageous in those days. Buxtehude might be heard as jazz improvisation—and the listeners had a comparable enthusiasm and personal investment in the music. People in those days routinely stood and applauded in the church. Buxtehude is theater. Critics who were Buxtehude’s contemporaries said often that Buxtehude did not need to write opera: the church was the theater of the time.”
— Ton Koopman, interview with Paul Janssen, Tijdschrift Oude Muziek, 2007, Band 2, 23.
DSM: The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are, basically, a golden age of theater. Throughout western Europe, the dramatic arts carried tremendous cultural prestige, political importance. They were also highly commercial.
CMT: The interactions between the Baroque audience members and performers were also intense and stylized. This is one of the points in Larry Norman’s book, published several years ago, and Kerala Snyder’s book, just published. The audience directly—not vicariously—participated in this popular form of social performance. The participation was a kind of ‘acting out’—a reification of the Enlightenment’s exalting of the individual. This is part of what Koopman means in his remarks during the interview with Paul Janssen. It was highly ‘active’, not ‘passive’.
DSM: Some of the aims of Buxtehude’s music—prime examples are the Cantatas in last night’s performance by the Amsterdam Baroque in Utrecht—are the shaping of space and time for the individual—the performer and the listener alike. There is a transcendental motive that directs the participant to consider her or his responsibility to regard the finiteness of human life and time’s passing—a duty to consider her/his place in the Universe. The individual in Baroque society has wonderful rights and new entitlements but with them come new duties—at least in Buxtehude’s Germany. Beautiful, inspiring Cantatas! But, still, these are cantatas for a fastidious German culture.
CMT: These Cantatas also call into question the relationship that musical and theatrical representations have to the subjects they portray. The Membra Jesu Nostris cantatas BuxWV 75 are sacred pieces, and yet they compel the performers and the audience members to examine what it is to be human, what it is for humans to regard their relationship to the Divine. Who are we to offer prayers of praise and supplication? Buxtehude is asking ‘What kind of supplicatory prayer is authentic?’
DSM: These Cantatas are not only authentic in and of themselves—they ‘ring true’ in the capable hands of Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (Miriam Meyer, soprano; Bettina Pahn, soprano; Bogna Bartosz, alto; Marco van de Klundert, tenor; Klaus Mertens, bass; Margaret Faultless, violin; David Rabinovich, violin; Jon Manson, viola da gamba; Susanne Braumann, viola da gamba; Alberto Rasi, bass viol; Michael Fentross, theorbo; Ton Koopman, organ). They also stand as exhortations to authentic conduct in all aspects of life—they assert that beauty and dignity depend on such conduct. Dialogical consonances, not just hierarchical ones. Narrative counterpoint with moral imperatives and individual free-will and consequences, not just passively-received, priestly counterpoint filled with determinism and dogma. The elegant tonal progressions and persuasive cadential ‘points’: these Cantatas function as philosophical meditations on right conduct in bourgeois secular society. In other words, they are not merely sacred ‘cantatas’—they are much more.
CMT: You mean they stand as propositions of the meaningfulness of human existence when one conducts one’s life with authenticity and earnestness. I think this is true. They’re convincing arguments against futility, absurdity, and nihilism. These are filled with emblems, symbols—you could say these Cantatas are allegorical in their rhetoric. I know that there are those who deny that music can use symbolism at all, who deny that allegory in music is even possible. To be sure, music doesn’t represent abstract concepts directly. But that doesn’t imply that allegory is impossible. The music supplies a sensual impression, and the meaning is superimposed on the impression by us. If we enter into the music at all, the meaning must be an individual, personal one—although we may be led to some degree by the composer, the artists' gestures, the program notes, other experiences and expectations, and so on. Individualism! All who participate—the performers, the audience members—turn that proposition round and round, during the time the music lasts and afterward. That’s part of the theatrical magic that Koopman and colleagues worked last night. That’s part, too, of what Koopman means regarding Buxtehude and baroque theater—theater that is intellectually deep, theater that can move minds and hearts. ‘Baroque’ as “irregular, individualistic pearl.” Bravo!
- Sonata in A minor, BuxWV 254
- Membra Jesu nostri, Cantatas 1 – 7, BuxWV 75
- Sonata in C major, BuxWV 266
- Oude Muziek Festival, Utrecht
- Ton Koopman MP3s at eMusic.com
- Ton Koopman website
- Koopman discography at Amazon.com
- Antz C. Sacrum theatrum Romanum: Das Wurzburger Neumunster und die katholische Baukunst in Deutschland zwischen 1680 und 1720. VDG, 1997.
- Norman L, ed. The Theatrical Baroque. SMA/UC, 2001.
- Schutz H. Barocktheater und Illusion. Lang, 1984.
- Snyder A. Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck. Eastman, 2007.
- Treppmann E. Besuche aus dem Jenseits: Geistererscheinungen auf dem deutschen Theater im Barock. UVK, 1999.
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