Buxtehude: Membra Jesu Nostri

Programme Notes

Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri

Dietrich Buxtehude’s cantatas entitled Membra Jesu nostri patientis sanctissima (The Most Holy Limbs of Our Suffering Jesus) contemplate seven parts of Christ’s crucified body – his pierced feet, bent knees, bleeding hands, wounded side, revered breast, loving heart, and thorn-crowned face. Combining vivid texts with intensely expressive music, they were, according to their title page in Buxtehude’s own hand, a personal act of piety and a gift to a “most honoured friend” Gustav Düben, cantor at the German Church in Stockholm and capellmeister of the Swedish court. At the heart of each of the seven cantatas is an aria setting three strophes of a Medieval mystical rhymed prayer known as Oratio rhythmica, famous in part because of its mistaken attribution to Bernard of Clairvaux, a hero of pious devotion. Buxtehude frames each central aria with a sacred concerto for voices and instruments setting a biblical text chosen to compliment the poetry and sets the tone for each cantata with an opening instrumental sonata. The result is an hourglass-like cantata form that moves from collective scripture reading by the concerto’s large ensemble, to personal reflection in the solo aria, and concludes with communal affirmation by repeating the concerto. At the heart of the cycle of cantatas is the most tender and intimate “Ad cor”. Here Buxtehude requests a dramatic instrumentation change to the delicate, shimmering timbre of an ensemble of five viols.

Devotional meditation served to evoke empathy and compassion for the suffering Christ, but also to bring comfort. The preface to a seventeenth century edition of Oratio rhythmica explains its purpose that “through the devout reading and meditation on the passion and death of Jesus Christ, sorrowful, repentant sinners and doubtful, afflicted hearts may be comforted and made joyful, and the faithful aroused to further, greater, and higher devotion in whatever they do, and inflamed by the Holy Spirit of God.” Besides poetry and music, the pious might employ images, including altar paintings, images in stained glass, and emblems (images, often bound together in books, combining a recognizable scene or symbolic collage with text that oriented the reader’s understanding of the scene or taught a moral lesson). Recent research has shown that some of the biblical texts chosen by Buxtehude were common epigrams on passion emblems. Perhaps Buxtehude and Düben’s audiences listened to these cantatas while contemplating the images in a book of emblems, or the Ecce homo painting in the German Church in Stockholm.

We are fortunate that this poignant window into the emotional life of the seventeenth century still survives. Gustav Düben bequeathed it and the rest of his exceptionally rich music library to his sons, who eventually donated it to the Uppsala University Library in two large wooden trunks. Apparently, these trunks were also home to a family of rats, and the university librarians promptly deposited the trunks and their contents in the cellar. There they remained until their rediscovery at the end of the nineteenth century by a music director from Buxtehude’s own city of Lübeck. Now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, most of the so called Düben Collection has be scanned and is freely available online.

(Christina Hutten)

Religious Piety and Music in the German Baroque

Seventeenth-century Germany experienced drastic social change. Although the Peace of Augsburg (1555) was an agreement ensuring religious freedom, this freedom applied to rulers only; it had nothing to do with ordinary people. For them, religious doctrine was still dictated from above. However, over the course of the seventeenth century, religion changed gradually, becoming a more personal domain based on individual belief. The disastrous outcome of The Thirty Years War (1618-48) left Central Europe deeply wounded, as well as conscious of the motto “memento mori” (remember your death). Individuals were looking for a personal relationship with God and were struggling to find the strength to maintain inner piety. At the same time, this struggle was also a battle for inner freedom.

This spirit of the era was clearly reflected in the arts – especially in literature and music. Johann Arnt, an influential theologian of this time and author of The True Christianity (a series of daily meditation books) maintained that the Kingdom of God could be found inside human beings and nowhere else; once one had found it, one must sacrifice oneself with true love (1664, vol. 3, fol. 2). The arts, reflecting this kind of thought, often featured the common motifs of “marriage with Jesus in Heaven” and “greeting Jesus as one’s bridegroom.” These motifs were occasionally expressed in extremely emotional, almost amorous ways, as one can observe in Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri.

In the programme for this concert, Buxtehude’s Membra is divided into several parts. Interspersed among them are thematically related musical settings by Heinrich Schütz (1685-1772) and Andreas Hammerschmidt (1611-75). Heinrich Schütz was the leading composer in seventeenth-century Germany. As a young man, he travelled to Italy to study the latest musical developments. He was especially impressed by the madrigal, which expressed human emotion in an explicit, straightforward manner, despite using sophisticated musical language. Love, pain, and desire were often central themes in this genre, and Schütz sought to interweave a traditional, sacred musical style with the subjective, emotional expression of the madrigal. The pair of motets, Ego dormio / Vulnerasti (SWV 63-64), were included in his collection Cantionae Sacrae, published in 1625 shortly after he returned to Germany from Italy. The text was taken from the Old Testament’s “Song of Songs,” also known as “Song of Solomon,” which holds a unique position in the Bible in terms of its literary form and expression; it is an erotic dialogue between two lovers, often interpreted as an allegory for the love between Christ and the believer. Schütz’s work employs dissonance and rhythmic contrast freely here in order to replicate the strikingly emotional tone of the text.

Another musical form that Schütz learned about during his time in Italy was the concerto. This term was synonymous with “symphonia” in Schütz’s time, both terms denoting the performance of music with instruments, usually not instruments alone, but rather instruments reinforcing and dialoguing with vocal parts. Instruments came to have increasingly independent functions during the seventeenth century, as composers began to seek instrumental musical idioms in earnest. O süßer Jesu Christ from Symphoniae Sacrae III (1650) is a perfect example of the mixing of voices and instruments, with each part offering its own type of expression. In Veni delecte, the instrumental parts (trombones) are integrated in a more homogeneous and harmonious texture with the vocal ones.

Andreas Hammerschmidt, organist of St. Johannes Church in Zittau in Saxony belongs to the generation between Schütz and Buxtehude. The text of his Verleihe uns Frieden/ Gib unserem Volke und Obrichkeit Frieden is from a German chorale by Martin Luther (a German paraphrasing of the Gregorian antiphon Da Pacem Domine). These pieces are an example of the concerto or symphonia genre, featuring a rich sound combination of solo voices or choir (upper two soprano parts were perhaps sung by children) together with wind and continuo instruments. This chorale was sung as part of Lutheran worship, representing the longing for peace in a time of struggle and suffering.

(Nozomi Sato)