Towards an Allegorical Interpretation of Buxtehude's Funerary CounterpointsAuthor(s): David YearsleyReviewed work(s):Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 80, No. 2 (May, 1999), pp. 183-206Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/855178 .Accessed: 23/01/2012 19:18

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TOWARDS AN ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATION OF BUXTEHUDE'S FUNERARY COUNTERPOINTS

BY DAVID YEARSLEY

Death looms so large and is terrifying because our foolish and fainthearted nature has etched its image too vividly within itself and constantly fixes its gaze on it.'

IF ONLY by its vastness, the archive of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran funerary texts-both literary and musical-attests to a cultural obsession with the commemoration of death: perhaps 100,000 published funeral sermons survive, as do over a thousand burial pieces, which account for about half of all the occasional music printed during the period.2 From the early years of the Reformation, Luther had encouraged diversity in local liturgical practices concerning death and burial,3 and as a result there was a proliferation of municipal ordinances carefully regulating funerary musical customs, often with great specificity as regards the kinds of pieces and performing forces appropriate to the social standing of the deceased. The income from funeral commissions often provided a crucial supplement to a musician's sometimes meagre salary. Occasionally a composer's artistic and monetary ambitions conflicted with a town council's prohibitions against the performance of elaborate- and expensive-burial music for citizens considered to occupy a position too low on the carefully monitored class hierarchy.4

The most famous and grandiose funerary works of the seventeenth century were written for members of the upper echelons of society: Schiitz's Musicalische Exequien of 1636, for example, was composed for the aptly named Prince Heinrich Posthumus von Reuss. Though less ambitious in scope, the expansive six-voice stile antico motet 'Zur selbigen Zeit' composed in 1667 by Schiitz's pupil Christoph Bernhard was none- theless an appropriate commemoration of the worldly position of the Hamburg mayor at whose funeral it was performed and in whose honour it was duly published.5 Works of this scale towered above the unison chorale singing typical of the funerals of ordinary citizens.

In contrast to such compulsory-and remunerative-tributes to powerful indi- viduals, funerary music written specifically for other musicians was inspired by personal ties and mutual respect between composer and colleague; appeals for

1 Martin Luther, 'A Sermon on Preparing to Die', Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan & Helmut T. Lehmann, St Louis, 1955-1976 (henceforth LW), xlii. 95-115, at p. 99.

2 See Eberhard Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener, Munich, 1967, p. 9. 3 See Luther, 'Preface to the Burial Hymns (1542)', LW, liii. 325-31, esp. p. 328. See, for example, Horst Walter, Musikgeschichte der Stadt Liineburg, Tutzing, 1951, pp. 195-200.

5 For a modem edition, see Threnodiae sacrae: Beerdigungskompositionen aus gedruckten Leichenpredigten des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wolfgang Reich ('Das Erbe deutscher Musik', lxxix), Wiesbaden, 1975, pp. 69-78. In Hamburg, specially commissioned funeral music was allowed only for the burial of mayors, although there seems to have been an exception for leading musicians; Matthias Weckmann, for example, wrote his own funeral motet, 'In te Domine speravi', which was performed under the direction of Bernhard at Weckmann's burial. See Norbert Bolin, 'Sterben ist mein Gewinn': Ein Beitrag zur evangelischen Funeralkomposition der deutschen Sepulkralkultur des Barock, 1550-1750, Kassel, 1985, p. 256; Liselotte Kriiger, Die Hamburgische Musikorganisation im 17. Jahrhundert, Strasbourg, 1933, p. 160.

183

burial music from a fellow musician surely drew from composers a particularly concentrated commitment to the task at hand. Johann Hermann Schein's deathbed appeal to Schiitz for a funeral motet, and, in turn, Schtitz's request for such music from Bernhard at his own burial must have made these pieces particularly meaningful to their respective composers. Bernhard would undoubtedly have lavished great care on his now lost stile antico motet for Schiitz's funeral, particularly as the work was to be vetted by the master himself and, indeed, was gratefully approved by him two years before his death.6

One of the most interesting and accomplished funerary works of the seventeenth century, Dietrich Buxtehude's Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth ('Peaceful and Joyful Journey'; BuxWV 76), published in Liibeck in 1674, represents an even more personal tribute.7 The two pieces of the 1674 collection were performed at the funeral of Buxtehude's father, Johannes, the musician from whom Buxtehude had first learnt the craft that would take him to the pinnacle of his profession. In 1673 the old man had moved south from the Danish city of Helsingor, where he had served as organist for 32 years, to Liibeck to live with his son; on his death in the following year at the age of 72, the funeral service was held in the Marienkirche, where Dietrich Buxtehude was organist, and his body was buried within the walls of the church, a privilege generally reserved for members of the upper classes.8 The honour accorded Johannes Buxtehude by the site of his burial was matched by the music composed by his son and performed at the service.

The first of the two pieces found in the Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfahrt is an elaborate contrapuntal setting of the Lutheran burial hymn 'Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin' and may originally have been composed and published for the 1671 funeral of an important Lubeck citizen, Meno Hanneken the elder.9 As city superintendent, Hanneken was a member of Liibeck's highest class, and Buxtehude's funerary tribute-both in its musical complexity and by the fact of its publication-was certainly more typical of Hanneken's standing than of a musician such as Johannes Buxtehude, situated along with brewers and lesser wholesalers in the fourth of Libeck's six classes.'0 Since his arrival in Liibeck in 1668, however, Dietrich Buxtehude, the city's leading musician, had been permitted a good deal of latitude in terms of the city's social regulations; for example, the municipal ordinances allowed his class only 35 wedding guests, yet Buxtehude's marriage feast was enjoyed by 70. Likewise, the publication of Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth, regardless of whether or not it involved previously composed material, was a luxury. This was not everyday funeral music in seventeenth-century Libeck.

The second of the two pieces that make up the Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth, the

'Klag-Lied' (henceforth 'Klagelied'), was certainly composed by Buxtehude specially for his father's funeral, and its threnody presents a marked contrast to the serene assurance of 'Mit Fried und Freud'. While the four strophes of 'Mit Fried und Freud',

6 See the comments in Johann Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, Hamburg, 1739 (repr. Berlin, 1910), 322. 7 Edited in Dietrich Buxtehudes Werke, ed. Wilibald Gurlitt, Klecken & Hamburg, 1925-38 (repr. New York, 1977), ii.

86-8. 8 See Bolin, 'Sterben ist mein Gewinn', pp. 69-70. 9 The identity of the burial music for Hanneken with that by Buxtehude is assumed by Kerala J. Snyder (Dieterich

Buxtehude: Organist in Liibeck, New York, 1987, p. 214) and contested by Dietrich Kilian (Das Vokalwerk Dietrich Buxtehudes, Berlin, 1956, p. 79) and Norbert Bolin ('Sterben ist mein Gewinn', p. 261). Hanneken's burial music is now lost-only the title-page survives-and the claim for the identity of the two pieces rests on the reference to 'two counterpoints' on the title-pages of the 1671 ('zween Contrapunctis') and 1674 ('2. Contrapuncten') publications, as well as similarly formulated comparisons between the two deceased men and the biblical figure of Simeon.

o0 Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, p. 45.

184

whose subject is sureness in the face of death, are composed according to the strict rules of invertible counterpoint, the strophic 'Klagelied' sets seven strophes of grieving poetry to a plaintive melody accompanied by two string instruments (marked 'tremulo')-presumably viols using bow vibrato-and continuo, pulsing through chains of suspensions. By turning to the antique and contrapuntally complex style in his settings of 'Mit Fried und Freud', Buxtehude projects a sense of universal truth and profound belief; the 'Klagelied', however, is written in the modern style and is immediate, expressive and questioning. The contrast between 'Mit Fried und Freud' and the 'Klagelied' parallels a shift in the discourse of contemporary funeral sermons, which, in comparison with those of the sixteenth century, increasingly emphasized affect over doctrine. As one contemporary theologian put it, 'Sermons of mourning and lament are more effective and go deeper into the heart'.11 In its two halves, the Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth parses craft and emotion, assurance and sorrow, and, in terms of musical style, the retrospective and the modern.

The stylistic contrast that characterizes the two pieces of the Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth is anticipated on the title-page, which opposes the instability and disorder of the world to the spiritual comforts awaiting the deceased in heaven: 'Johannis Buxtehude [has] departed with peace andjoy from this troubled and anxiety-wracked world and has been taken home by his Redeemer, who has been awaiting him with longing' (see P1. I). The rhetorical opposition between the mundane and the celestial was a standard topic of seventeenth-century funeral oration and religious poetry, and the dedication of Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth likewise views Johannes Buxtehude's death as a release from the difficulties of this life, with the implicit promise of everlasting joy in the next. And the two funerary pieces that constitute the publication offered the mourners divergent musical views of death, the 'Klagelied' through sensual expression, and 'Mit Fried und Freud' through the tone of reverence and belief attending the stile antico and the intellectual and spiritual qualities of invertible counterpoint itself.

The burial hymn 'Mit Freud und Freud ich fahr dahin' (first published at Wittenberg in 1524) appeared in 1542 in the first collection of funerary chorales to be published after the Reformation. In the preface, Luther claimed that these hymns represented an attitude towards death fundamentally different from that of his Catholic opposition: 'We do not want our churches to be houses of wailing and places of mourning any longer... Nor do we sing any dirges or doleful songs.' Instead, he urged the bereaved 'not to sorrow over the dead as others who have no hope, but to comfort each other with God's Word as having a certain hope of life and of the resurrection of the dead'.12 From its inception, the Lutheran liturgy was meant to affirm this vision, andd hymns such as 'Mit Fried und Freud' were intended to reassure mourners that the dead body in the coffin was destined for resurrection and later reunion with the departed soul; the pastoral and musical message at the time of burial was one of consolation through the promise of redemption. This resistance to emotional surrender, the refusal to be overwhelmed by grief, is at the core of Buxtehude's treatment of 'Mit Fried und Freud', with its calm, seemingly eternal confidence. Here, the consonant certainty of the music testifies to belief.'3

" Caspar Titius, Loci theologi historici, Leipzig, 1684, p. 1290: 'daB [Klag- und Trauer Predigten] mehr afficiren und naher zu Hertzen gehen'; given in Winfried Zeller, 'Leichenpredigt und Erbauungsliteratur', Leichenpredigten als Quell historischer Wissenschaften, ed. Rudolf Lenz, Cologne, 1975, pp. 66-81, at p. 67.

12 Luther, 'Preface to the Burial Hymns (1542)', LW, liii. 325-6. 13 In the same vein, Buxtehude's friend Andreas Werckmeister 'never played any dissonance or an evil-sounding

note' while mourning the death of his first wife and child ('Er hat aber niemahls einige Dissonans oder ubel-klingenden Thon der Ungedult von sich horen lasen') according to the sermon preached at Werckmeister's funeral by Johann [cont. on p. 187]

185

PLATE I

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186

The text of 'Mit Fried und Freud' consists of Luther's four-strophe paraphrase of the Nunc dimittis, and articulates the resolute response to death found throughout his writings:

Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin With peace and joy I depart in Gottes Willen, in the will of God, getrost ist mir mein Herz und Sinn, my heart and mind are consoled, sanft und stille, soft and still, wie Gott mir verheissen hat as God has promised me, der Tod ist mein Schlaf worden. death has become my sleep.

There is no mention here of the troubles of the world; instead the poetic 'I' dies with 'peace and joy', and, in one of Luther's favoured metaphors, death is portrayed as sleep; in one of his funeral sermons Luther argued that '[Our Lord God] will send death to you only in the sense that you will die as far as your five senses are concerned, as in sleep'.'4 Lutheran theology construed graves as resting-places (dormitoria) from which the dead would be raised up at the Last Judgement.'5 The faithfully departed could look forward to a realm devoid of physical strain and sinful desire, in which, as one seventeenth-century funeral sermon put it, there would be 'no old age, no weaknesses of the body, no debilitation, but instead nothing but eternal youth, enduring beauty, everlasting strength and health'.'6 In the preface to the 1542 edition of burial hymns, Luther explains his admonitions against excessive mourning with the promise of the non-physical human form which the saved will have in heaven: '[St. Paul] bans from his sight every ugly aspect of death in our mortal body and brings to the fore a wholly delightful and joyous picture of life when he says: ... it is sown [i.e., buried] a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body'.'7 Transfiguration allowed Luther and the orthodox theologians of the next century to promise their followers the resurrection of the body and the complete transcendence of the sentient and sin- wracked nature that had marked existence on earth and its accompanying sorrows, the most fearful of which was death.

Luther upheld the traditional definition of biological death as the separation of the soul from the body, and this view continued to be articulated in the funerary literature of the seventeenth century.'8 At the moment of death, the soul leaves the body and, if saved, returns to heaven. This was an essential feature of Lutheran orthodoxy which, in contrast to the delayed judgement of Roman Catholic purgatory, promised immediate reward to true believers. As the Rostock theologian Heinrich Muller put it in a funeral sermon from a volume published in 1675: 'The moment in which the soul [leaves] the

Melchior B6ssen on 26 October 1706 and published the following year. The sermon is reprinted in Andreas Werckmeister, 'Hypomnemata musica' und andere Schriften, Hildesheim, 1970, unpaginated. 4 Luther, 'Two Funeral Sermons, 1532', LW, li. 229-55, at p. 239.

'5 The title of the fourth volume ofJohann Heermann's series of funeral sermons reflects this conception of the graves of the blessed: Dormitoria: Etlicher frommer Christen Schlaff-Hduslein. Das ist Christlicher Leich-Predigten Vierdter Theil, Rostock, 1650.

16 Johann Heermann, Christianae euthanasias statutae, Leipzig, 1630, p. 262: 'kein Alter, keine Leibes Schwachheit, keine UnvermBglichkeit, sonder eitel bestendige Jugend, trawerhafftige [i.e., dauerhafte] Schonheit, immerwaihende Stirke und Gesundheit'; given in Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener, p. 149. Here and elsewhere, I have replaced the oblique strokes used as punctuation in seventeenth-century German with commas.

17 Luther, 'Preface to the Burial Hymns (1542)', L W, liii. 326. Luther makes this same distinction between the physical and spiritual body in 'Two Funeral Sermons, 1532', LW, li. 238. 18 Consider, for example, the following passage by Johann Heermann, whose four-volume set of funeral sermons was

widely read: 'As soon as man dies, the soul is separated and disengaged from the body, and returns to God' ('So bald [der Mensch] stirbet, wird die Seele vom Leibe ab- und auffgeloset, und kompt wieder zu Gott'); Heermann, Christianae euthanasias statutae, p. 603, given in Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener, p. 146.

187

body is exactly the moment that it travels to heavenly bliss'.19 The title-page of Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth makes it clear that Johannes Buxtehude has been saved; his death is described as blessed ('seeligen ableiben'), and the collection's contents are offered 'dutifully honouring and in Christian praise of the blessed deceased [who was] his dearly beloved father' ('Dem Seelig-verstorbenen, als seinem herzlich geliebten Vater zu schuldigen Ehren und Christlichen nachruhme'). The 'peaceful and joyful journey' of the title is that of the biblical figure of the old and faithful Simeon ('des alten groBglaubigen Simeons'); by association with Simeon, a symbol of all Christians and of an exemplary death, Johannes Buxtehude is seen to have died with an unwavering belief in God. Testimony to a devout Christian life is also scattered across the seven strophes of the 'Klagelied', including, in the fifth, the crucial quotation of the dying words-spoken by the father to his son: 'I will wait for you with longing' ('Deiner wart' ich mit Verlangen')-which were commonly cited in contemporary funeral sermons and are here offered as dramatic proof of Johannes's abiding faithfulness and love for his son.20

Because death meant either instant gratification for the soul or its damnation, the congregation at Johannes Buxtehude's funeral would have been encouraged to believe that his spirit had already ascended to heaven. But for the purposes of offering the listeners a dramatic representation of the spirit's journey, the chorale provides first- person narration and comment on its joyful ascent. The rhetorical trope employed is prosopopoeia, pervasive in seventeenth-century German funeral orations and in all genres of burial music, including the chorale.21 The purpose of this figure was to give the impression that the soul of the dead person was speaking through the preacher-or singer-directly to the congregation; this effect was given further dramatic power by the common practice of placing the coffin directly below the pulpit, so that in the case of the funeral sermon, the assembled mourners would hear 'the deceased himself preaching through prosopopoeia directly from the coffin' ('gleichsam per prosopopoiian den Verstorbenen selbst aus dem Sarge herffirpredigten').22 In Buxtehude's setting, then, the 'I' of the opening verse of 'Mit Fried und Freud' would have been taken to represent the soul of Johannes Buxtehude singing to the congregation, consoling them with the assurance that his spirit has left the body and made the journey to heaven: 'With peace and joy I depart'. Although the title-page describes 'Mit Fried und Freud' as having been sung ('abgesungen')-and it is printed in four parts (soprano, alto, tenor and bass clefs)-Johann Gottfried Walther claimed, some 60 years after the publication of Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth, that it was an organ piece. But whether the cantus firmus was sung or played, it would have remained richly significant to a congregation in whose consciousness the chorale was so deeply embedded that its melody was inseparable from its text; in either case, the rhetorical power of the trope to give voice to the spirit of the deceased would have been abetted by Buxtehude's elaborate contrapuntal treatment, which, as I shall show, also speaks from the soul.23

19 Heinrich Miiller, Graber der Heiligen, Frankfurt, 1675, p. 100: 'der Blick, darinn die Seel aul dem Corper, ist eben der Blick, darinn sie fahrt in die himmlische Seligkeit'; given in Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutscher Luthertum bis Spener, p. 164. Buxtehude knew Miller's poetry and set his 'Was mich auf dieser Welt betriibt' (BuxWV 105) and 'Wie schmeckt es so lieblich und wohl' (BuxWV 108); see Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, p. 146.

20 Miller was particularly fond of such citations; see Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener, p. 171.

21 For a discussion of this figure, see Gregory S. Johnston, 'Rhetorical Personification of the Dead in 17th-Century German Funeral Music: Heinrich Schiitz's Musikalische Exequien (1636) and Three Works by Michael Wiedemann (1693)', Journal of Musicology, ix (1991), 186-213.

22 Titius, Loci theologi historici, p. 1291; given in Zeller, 'Leichenpredigt und Erbauungsliteratur', p. 67. 23 In a funeral piece by Michael Wiedemann dated 1693, the soul of the dead man speaks through what the

188

Given the Lutheran emphasis on the release of the spirit at death, it is perhaps not surprising that Buxtehude should have chosen to set the funerary hymn 'Mit Fried und Freud' in invertible counterpoint. Not only would this backward-looking mode of composition have powerfully represented tradition and belief, but, perhaps more important, it appealed directly to the intellectual faculties, to the spiritual rather than the physical. In short, strict counterpoint was the style which best avoided sensuous engagement with the body. Christoph Bernhard alluded to the important stylistic differentiation to be made between spiritual and physical music in his preface to the 1673 publication of stile antico Masses by Johann Theile.24 Bernhard praised Theile's compositions for having been 'purified of all lasciviousness' ('von aller Geilheit saubere'),25 and implied that the stile antico, elaborated with intricate contrapuntal devices, not only encouraged decorous religious devotion but also nourished the soul rather than the senses. In the context of burial, such music anticipated a transfigured body cleansed of sin and freed from pain. Berhard's own funeral motet for Schiitz was expressly written in the style of Palestrina ('nach dem pranestinischen Styl'),26 not only as a testament to his teacher's mastery of that tradition but as a musical representation of the transcendence of earthly suffering, an emancipation from the prison of physical existence.27

All four strophes of Buxtehude's 'Mit Fried und Freud' conform to the stylus gravis, the antique style described by Bernhard in his widely disseminated Tractatus compositionis augmentatus.28 The opening Contrapunctus places the unadorned chorale melody in long notes in the soprano above a rhythmically more active texture in the lower parts. The musical material of the opening movement is repeated in the first Evolutio, where it is transposed from D-Dorian to A-Dorian, with the outer voices (soprano and bass) exchanging places while the inner voices (alto and tenor) switch positions. This pair of settings is mirrored by the second Contrapunctus and its Evolutio, the latter ingeniously constructed following the same pattern of contrapuntal inversion but exploiting in addition the melodic inversion of the individual voices (see Ex. 1).

The careful harmonic movement and exacting contrapuntal construction of Buxtehude's 'Mit Fried und Freud' does not seek to move the affections by engaging the body; rather, it presents a placid texture, articulated through the precise manipulation of strict techniques. In all four strophes of 'Mit Fried und Freud', Buxtehude creates a predominantly consonant texture, almost a necessity since the voices must allow for inversion; melodically, he avoids all harsh skips, with the exception of one downward leap of a diminished fifth.29 The first Contrapunctus and

composer calls the 'Seelen Stimme'; see Johnston, 'Rhetorical Personification of the Dead in 17th-Century German Funeral Music', p. 210.

24 One of the greatest contrapuntal enthusiasts and teachers of the late seventeenth century, Johann Theile was living in Libeck when his Pars prima Missarum (Wismar, 1673) was published with the financial support of Buxtehude and Bernhard, among others.

25 Given in Carl Dahlhaus's preface to the facsimile of Johann Theile, Musicalisches Kunstbuch ('Denkmaler norddeutscher Musik', i), Kassel, 1965, p. viii. 26 According to Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, p. 322. 27 For the body as prison, see Miiller, Graber der Heiligen, p. 696; Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis

Spener, p. 162. 28

Christoph Bernhard's Tractatus compositionis augmentatus is given in Die Kompositionslehre Heinrich Schutzens in der Fassung seines Schiilers Christoph Bernhard, ed. Joseph Miiller-Blattau, 2nd edn., Kassel, 1963, pp. 40-121; for a translation, see Walter Hilse, 'The Treatises of Christoph Bernhard', The Music Forum, iii (1973), 31-196. The Tractatus was probably compiled about 1660; see Paul Walker, Fugue in German Theory (unpublished dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1987, p. 252.

9 Berhard admits this interval in the stylus gravis; see Bernhard, Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, ed. Miller- Blattau, p. 58.

189

Ex. 1 Buxtehude, 'Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin', BuxWV 76/1

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its Evolutio eschew chromaticism and affective inflection; the only chromatic alterations are on the sixth and seventh degrees of the scale and occur as the result of melodic motion. The contrapuntal motion complies with Bernhard's rules for the stylus gravis: all the dissonances on strong beats are prepared, and unprepared dissonances are merely passing notes. The accompanying voices of the second Contrapunctus and its Evolutio are more active, with occasional hints at chromaticism. But Buxtehude still avoids emotional excess, and the piece remains within the confines of the strict style. The staid melodic movement and dissonance treatment parallel the calm certainty of the text, and the restrained aural effect of the invertible counterpoint presents a music of the 'kingdom of heaven, where sense is not'.3

However, the 'Klagelied' is a different case. Although Luther had inveighed against the use of dirges at funerals, he recognized that the expression of grief was a necessary

30 Luther, 'Lectures on Isaiah: Chapters 40-66', LW, xvii. 334. The metaphysical problems associated with the music of heaven were of some concern to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music theorists. Towards the end of his career, Mattheson turned to questions of heavenly music; in Behauptung der himmlischen Musik (Hamburg, 1747, pp. 70, 77) he concurred with the assertion of the seventeenth-century theorist J. A. Herbst that the music of heaven 'will be performed in the angelic, heavenly choir, with the highest perfection (as both science and art) for all eternity to the praise and glory of God' ('im dem englischen, himmlichen Chor, mit hochsten Vollkommenheit (als Wissenschaft und Kunst zugleich) zu Gottes Lob und Preis, in alle Ewigkeit ausgeiibet werden wird'). But Mattheson was at great pains to argue, in opposition to tradition, that this music would still be a physical-though transfigured-phenomenon, since for him there was no music, even in heaven, without the senses. For more on the sensual nature of angelic music, see Joyce Irwin, Neither Heart nor Song Alone, New York, 1993, p. 137.

192

(d) Evolutio [II]

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A

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part of coming to terms with death, and he disparaged complete stoicism at the loss of a friend or family member as an 'artificial virtue and a fabricated strength'.31 During the course of the seventeenth century, the consolatory mission of the liturgy and of pastoral care during bereavement was emphasized through the frequent citation of Augustine's aphorism that funeral rites were for the comfort of the living rather than for the benefit of the dead, since the essential message at the time of burial was one of assurance to the survivors.32 It is the second part of Fried- und Freudenreiche, the 'Klagelied', which represents and encourages this emotional reaction to death.

Whereas 'Mit Fried und Freud' reflects the music of the soul bound for heaven, the 'Klagelied' dramatizes the anxiety of the mourners; the title of the piece ('Song of lament'), as well as the immediately accessible and affective style of the music, announce that the work is of this world and not of the next. Unfettered by a pre- existing melody and the doctrinal status of chorale texts, particularly those attributed to Luther, the 'Klagelied' offered Buxtehude the possibility of great immediacy and expressiveness;33 in contrast to the arcane chorale setting, the worldly style of its music appeals directly to the senses and conveys its content independently of any study or technical expertise on the part of the listener. This turn from the venerable, universal chorale to the moder, personal Lied reflects the tendency towards individual emotion manifested in contemporary poetry, a trend particularly prominent in many of the publications which Buxtehude knew and from which he drew texts for his music. The generic possibilities afforded by the Lied, with its freedom from intricate contrapuntal rules such as those governing chorale-based compositions, are here crucial to the musical expression of the text.34 The tradition of Palestrina and the contrapuntal researches of Theile would not serve such purposes. Instead of pure spirit, the 'Klagelied' is a heartfelt lament of the kind Martin Fuhrmann, who attended at least one performance of Buxtehude's Abendmusik in Liibeck, described in 1706 as 'a sonata for burial and other sorrowful occasions, which must be movingly set and slowly performed'.35 The main requirement of the genre, according to Fuhrmann, was that it should engage the affections of the listener, that the music should express grief rather than sublimate it. The 'Klagelied' does indeed render emotional release palpable, evoking a response similar to that witnessed by the seventeenth-century north German poet Johann Rist, who, on attending a performance of Passion music, described how the congregation's 'hot tears were excited and forced to tumble out' ('heisse Tranen auszustiirzen gereizet und gezwungen').36 Such music was not simply a representation of mourning; it was an invitation, even a demand, to participate in the threnody. In contrast to Buxtehude's contrapuntal presentation of 'Mit Fried und Freud', which encouraged a distanced contemplation, the power of such passionate music to move the affections and involve the listener physically could prove irresistible.

The text of the 'Klagelied' was probably written by Buxtehude himself,37 and it

3" Luther, 'Two Funeral Sermons, 1532', LW, li. 232. 32 Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener, p. 144. Because of the centrality of consolation and

assurance in burial services, Norbert Bolin has argued that Lutheran funerals of Buxtehude's time cannot be characterized as rites of mourning, nor should the music be called 'Trauermusik'; see Bolin, 'Sterben ist mein Gewinn' esp. p. 100.

33 See Martin Geck, Die Vokalmusik Dietrich Buxtehudes und derfriihe Pietismus, Kassel, 1965, p. 131. 34 See the discussion ibid., pp. 119-31.

3Martin Fuhrmann, Musicalischer-Trichter, Frankfurt an der Spree (Berlin), 1706, p. 87: 'eine Sonata bei Begrabnissen und dergleichen traurigen Zufallen, muB beweglich gesetzt und langsam gemacht werden'. Fuhrmann studied with Buxtehude's pupil Friedrich Klingenberg; see Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, p. 131.

36 Given in Rolf Dammann, Der Musikbegriff im deutschen Barock, Cologne, 1967, p. 228. 37 As an educated composer, Buxtehude would have been expected to be competent in the writing of poetry; witness

193

evokes a charged atmosphere much like that described by Rist. Whereas the text of'Mit Fried und Freud' has the status of truth, that of the 'Klagelied' delivers an individual statement on death, and in the absence of intervening ritornellos or a framing sinfonia, its message is delivered uninterrupted with no pause for reflection: in this representa- tion, grief is unrelenting. For poetic models, Buxtehude could well have turned to Fritzsch's Himmels Lust und Welt-Unlust ('Delight in Heaven and Aversion to the World') in its first edition of 1670,38 a volume which provided Buxtehude with another of his aria texts concerned with death, Heinrich Muller's 'EntreiBt euch, meine Sinne, / und steiget, Wolken auf' ('Tear yourself away, my spirits, and climb to heaven'; BuxWV 25).39 Like much of the poetry collected by Fritzsch, the seven strophes of the

'Klagelied' catalogue the misery of earthly existence while intermittently attesting to the truth of salvation and the joys awaiting in heaven.4 The 'Klagelied', however, gestures towards heavenly flight only to fixate on the grief of mourners and the anguish which visits them after the death of a loved one. Thus according to the first strophe

MuB der Tod denn auch entbinden, Must death then also dissolve was kein Fall entbinden kann? what nothing else can rend asunder? Mu3 sich der mir auch entwinden, Must he wrench himself from me, der mir klebt dem Herzen an? he who clings to my heart? Ach! der Vgter triibes Scheiden Oh! the fathers' sad departure machet gar zu herbes Leiden, causes too much bitter suffering, wenn man unsre Brust entherzt, when our heart is torn away, solches mehr als t6dlich schmerzt. it is more painful than death.

The affect of the text could not be further from the reassuring message of 'Mit Fried und Freud'. Whereas the chorale presents a death as benign as sleep for the deceased, the 'Klagelied' depicts the violent suffering inflicted on the survivors; this is emphas- ized by powerful verbs such as 'entbinden', 'entwinden' and 'entherzen', and through the cries of anguish released by the mourners in the first strophe, at 'Ach! der Viter triibes Scheiden', and again in the fourth, with 'Ach! wie heftig ist der Schmerz' ('Oh! how intense is the pain'). While the soul of the dead man has been freed from the senses, those left behind remain imprisoned by them, as the 'Klagelied' demonstrates with its ubiquitous complaints against physical and emotional suffering (e.g. 'herbes Leiden' and 'schmerzt' in the first strophe). References to the body abound ('Herzen', 'Brust'), and earthly life accrues nothing but misery ('(Eitelkeiten) der Erde').

In the sixth strophe, the conditions of heaven are juxtaposed with those of earth in a

description of two contrasting musical discourses which parallel the stylistic polarities found in the collection itself:

Er spielt nun die Freuden-Lieder He is now playing songs of joy auf des Himmels-Lust-Clavier, on the joyous heavenly keyboard, da die Engel hin und wieder where the angels from time to time singen ein mit siszer Zier. join in singing with sweet ornament.

his dedicatory poems for Andreas Werckmeister's Harmonologia musica, oder Kurtze Anleitung zur musicalischen Composition (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1702; repr. Hildesheim, 1970). The finest composer-poet of the period was certainly Johann Hermann Schein, who wrote funeral music for which he also provided the text; see Gerhard Schuhmacher, 'Musikbeigaben in Leichenpredigten', Leichenpredigtes als Quelle historischer Wissenschaften, ed. Lenz, pp. 408-25.

Christoph Bernhard also wrote consolatory poetry; see Johnston, 'Rhetorical Personification of the Dead in 17th-

Century German Funeral Music', p. 195. 38 Ahasverus Fritzsch, Himmels Lust und Welt-Unlust, Jena, 1670 (2nd edn., Leipzig, 1679). 39 This text would later appear in the Luneburgischen Gesangbuch of 1686 under the rubric 'Sterbelieder' ('Songs of the

dying'); see Geck, Die Vokalmusik Dietrich Buxtehudes und derfriihe Pietismus, pp. 208-9. 40 The opposition between earth and heaven, suffering and salvation, also informs another surviving funeral work by

Buxtehude, the 'Trost-Lied', BuxWV 61; see Bolin, 'Sterben ist mein Gewinn', pp. 264-7.

194

Hier ist unser Leid-Gesange Here our song of suffering is schwarze Noten Traur-Gemenge a sorrowful medley of black notes mit viel Kreuzen durchgemischt, mixed with many crosses [= sharps], Dort ist alles mit Lust erfrischt. there everything is refreshed with joy.

While the survivors suffer along with the doleful music of earth, Johannes Buxtehude is taking part in the heavenly concert, playing hymns of joy on his beloved keyboard. The musical styles mentioned here correspond to those of 'Mit Fried und Freud' (the joyous song of heaven) and the 'Klagelied' (the 'sorrowful medley'). The former is sweet and harmonious, the latter bitter and sad. Buxtehude's poetry even gives this dichotomy a stylistic gloss by describing earthly music as laden with black notes ('schwarze Note') and chromaticism ('viel Kreuzen'),41 puns which turn on their dual reference to music theory and to the vicissitudes of life. Black was, of course, the colour of mourning, and the cross the symbol of earthly suffering; in musical terms, however, black notes and frequent chromatic inflection characterized the modern style and were therefore a vital means for an appeal to the senses and, in this case, the representation of grief. Whereas 'Mit Fried und Freud' is for the most part consonant, the 'Klagelied' is built around dissonance, and particularly suspensions, which here evoke emotional tension and release, moments of increased pathos which heighten the insistent plaint of the strings. The opening is made up of a chain of suspensions leading to a tonic cadence on the first beat of bar 2 (see Ex. 2). The vocal part enters against this background of dissonance on the third beat; it is consonant with the bass but sharply dissonant with the middle parts, which continue their suspensions. The resulting harmony when the voice enters is a highly dissonant cluster, an unstable, disturbed sonority which signals the prevailing affect of the piece and amplifies the expressiveness of the voice's entry. This contrasts greatly with 'Mit Fried und Freud'; although there are several suspensions in the latter, they are isolated events, essentially ornaments which quickly yield to the predominantly consonant texture and to the imperatives of contrapuntal precision.

In place of the stylus gravis which governs the heavenly music of 'Mit Fried und Freud', the 'Klagelied' seeks above all else to engage the passions through the affective power of the stylus luxurians communis. Thus the 'Klagelied' delivers a subjective poetics which is given emotional potency through the moder style and its freedom of dissonance and melodic treatment. The soprano's downward leap of a minor sixth in the opening bar is a typical figure of sorrow-Bernhard's saltus duriusculus42-and anticipates the word 'Tod' on the first beat of bar 2. Likewise, the descending minor sixth in bar 4 depicts the word 'Fall' and is used later in the piece before the word 't6dlich', in preparation for the final cadence. The underlay of the subsequent strophes interrupts this direct rhetorical correspondence between text and melody, but the positive aspects of dying to which the text later alludes are always heard against the overriding sorrowful affect of the piece; the poet/composer does not doubt the truth of salvation but can barely bring himself to release his father from the world: 'I, as the son, cannot begrudge him the immense joy of Jesus' ('Jesu Freuden ubergrosz / Ich, als Sohn, ihm g6nnen musz'). Only in the final strophe, in which the poet turns from the mourners to address the soul of the deceased, does lament abate as Buxtehude accepts his father's death: 'Sleep well,

4 Bolin, in contrast, interprets this phrase as a reference to the sharps found in both the first and second Evolutio, where they become necessary, at least in part, because of the transposition up a fifth from D-Dorian to A.

42 Tractatus compositionis augmentatus, ed. Muiller-Blattau, pp. 78-9.

195

Ex. 2 Buxtehude, 'Klagelied', BuxWV 76/2

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dearly beloved, farewell, you blessed soul' ('Schlafe wohl, du Hochgeliebter / lebe wohl, du seelge Seel').43 Because of the strophic form, however, this affirmative leave-taking is declaimed above music of lament. Though the 'Klagelied' acknow- ledges the funerary dialectic of hope and sorrow, it embraces the latter, leaving the task of consolation to 'Mit Fried und Freud'. In their stylistic opposition, the two pieces of the Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth discharge the dual pastoral mission, shared with funeral homiletics, of offering comfort to the mourners through the reaffirmation of belief and the possibility for catharsis.

But although Buxtehude purposely juxtaposes a contrapuntal chorale-setting and a Lied in the Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth, it would be a mistake to give greater currency to the more moder and immediately expressive of these two genres, and to claim that the treatment of 'Mit Fried und Freud' was meant only as a form of consolation and as an endorsement of doctrinal truth. The stile antico may have had a venerable past in commemorating the deaths of figures such as Heinrich Schiitz, but for Buxtehude and many of his north German colleagues invertible counterpoint-a

43 The poet speaking directly to the father can be heard as part of a dialogue with the departed soul which has spoken (to the son and the assembled mourners) through prosopopoeia in the chorale.

196

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mode of learned composition which, in tandem with canon, was widely studied and practised by many of the leading figures of the later seventeenth century-remained a thriving element of musical discourse among the discipline's often secretive, sometimes obsessive practitioners.44 Indeed, for the devotees of the art, the peculiar workings of double counterpoint, which called for the inversion of two or more voices without violation of contrapuntal rules, were attended by a range of vibrant allegorical meanings. In terms of style, Buxtehude's chorale-setting transcends the body and so points towards heaven; but even more powerfully, his elaboration of 'Mit Fried und Freud' refers beyond itself by exploiting an allegorical richness that gave this music special relevance to the topic of death in general and in particular to the deaths of learned musicians and amateurs who would have valued the unique qualities of the technique.

The phrase 'in 2. Contrapuncten abgesungen' constitutes the only stylistic reference on the title-page of Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth to the collection's contents. This privileges the strict procedures of 'Mit Fried und Freud'-which contains the 'two counterpoints'-over the looser ones of the 'Klagelied'.45 In so doing, the title-page projects the view that an involved work in the stile antico is a proper tribute to an organist and musician described as 'kunstreich', but it also places Buxtehude's setting of 'Mit Fried und Freud' within a uniquely north German practice of linking death and invertible counterpoint.

Buxtehude's elaboration of the chorale 'Mit Fried und Freud' is in fact closely modelled on another collection that commemorates death through invertible counter- point; in its deployment of voices and schemes of contrapuntal inversion, Buxtehude's setting follows exactly the first four pieces of Christoph Berhard's Prudentia prudentiana (Hamburg, 1669; BerWV IV).46 The title-page of Prudentia prudentiana describes the work as a 'consolation' ('solatio') for Rudolf Capell,47 Bemhard's colleague at the Hamburg Johanneum and a professor of Greek and rhetoric, who had lost his mother and his wife; because the collection was composed after their deaths, it seems unlikely that it was intended as funeral music.4 Like Meno Hanneken the elder, Capell was a highly educated man for whom the erudition of Bernhard's contrapuntal essay would have been a fitting tribute, and he would certainly have recognized the literary reference of the title of Prudentia prudentiana; the cantus firmus of the first four

* The so-called Sweelinck manuscript was an important inspiration for study in this field, as was Matthias Weckmann's Kurtz doch deutliche Regulen von denen doppelten Contrapuncten, which probably dates from after the middle of the century; see J. P. Sweelinck: Werken, x: Compositions-Regeln, ed. Hermann Gehrmann, Leipzig, 1901 (repr. Farborough, 1968), and Walker, Fugue in German Theory, pp. 346-64. Buxtehude's colleague Johann Theile was the most prolific theorist of learned counterpoint; for a list of his surviving treatises, see Harald Kfimmerling, Katalog der Sammlung Bokemeyer, Kassel, 1970, pp. 11-12. For an account of an obsession with counterpoint reported by Johann Valentin Meder, Kapellmeister in Danzig, to whom Buxtehude dedicated the canon BuxWV 123, see Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, p. 219.

45 Although no reference is made to the 'Klagelied', it was often the case that additional works were not mentioned on the title-pages of publications of funerary music; see Bolin, 'Sterben ist mein Gewinn', p. 261. 4 For a moder edition of Prudentia prudentiana, see Christoph Bernhard: Geistliche Konzerte und andere Werke, ed. Otto Drechsler ('Das Erbe deutscher Musik', xc), Kassel, 1982, pp. 189-93. Given Buxtehude's well-documented interest in invertible counterpoint and canon, it is entirely to be expected that he would have acquired Bernhard's publication. The two composers probably knew each other, and their shared interest in counterpoint is reflected in their financial support of the publication of Theile's collection of Masses (see n. 24, above); also contributing to the project were Johann Adam Reinken and, not coincidentally, Meno Hanneken the younger, son of the superintendent for whom Buxtehude had written his funerary counterpoints of 1671. A graphic example of social and musical interest in counterpoint can be seen inJohannes Vorhout's 1674 painting of Reinken, Theile and Buxtehude in which Theile holds a commemorative canon; see Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, pp. 110, 212-33.

47 For the full title of the publication, see Bolin, 'Sterben ist mein Gewinn' p. 255. 8 Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, p. 215.

197

movements is the Latin funeral hymn 'Iam moesta quiesce querela', the text of which was written by the fourth-century poet Aurelius Prudentius;49 it appeared along with 'Mit Fried und Freud' in Luther's 1542 edition of burial hymns,50 and in seventeenth-

century Luibeck it was sung during burial processions.51 Like 'Mit Fried und Freud' it is a hymn of belief and consolation, and the text exhorts the faithful to 'silence sad laments' and to cease mourning the departed:

Iam moesta quiesce querela Now silence sad laments, lacrymas suspendite matres, mothers, suspend your tears, nullus sua pignora plangat let no one mourn loved ones, mors haec reparatio vitae est. this death is a reparation for life.

Also descended from Prudentia prudentiana, or perhaps, more directly, from Buxte- hude's 'Mit Fried und Freud', is a work by the Copenhagen organist Martin Radek entitled 'Jesus Christus unser Heylandt, in ordinari und doppelten Contrapunt gesetzt', that is, 'set in ordinary and double counterpoint' (see Ex. 3).52 As his contribution to the art of writing in double counterpoint, Radek treated the well-known communion chorale, which was also sung on Maundy Thursday and was associated with the Passion and death of Christ. Only one strophe of double counterpoint along with its inversion survives; the opening clearly derives from the melodic invention of its

predecessors, and the subsequent inversion follows the scheme used by Bernhard and then Buxtehude. It is certainly possible that Radek originally wrote another

counterpoint-inversion pair, both reproducing the melodic inversions found in the third and fourth strophes of Prudentia prudentiana and 'Mit Fried und Freud'.

Nearly twenty years after the appearance of Buxtehude's Fried- und Freudenreiche

Hinfarth, the Liineburg organist Christian Flor published a work of learned counter-

point with the striking title Todesgedanken in dem Liede: 'Auf meinen lieben Gott' mit

umgekehrtem Contrapuncte furs Clavier sehr kiinstlich gesetzt und gedruckt zu Hamburg 1692

('Thoughts on Death in the Song "Auf meines lieben Gott", in invertible counterpoint very artfully set for the clavier and printed in Hamburg 1692').53 The work is no longer extant, so it is impossible to know whether Flor, too, found inspiration in the

contrapuntal collections of Bernhard and Buxtehude, although it is not unlikely that

9 'Iam moesta quiesce querela' was also sung in one of several German translations, but in Hamburg, which maintained a large proportion of Latin liturgy throughout the seventeenth century, the melody continued to be associated with its Latin text, just as it was in Liibeck; see Wilhelm Stahl, Musikgeschichte Lubecks, ii: Geistliche Musik, Kassel, 1952, p. 65. For the German versions of the hymn, see Philipp Wackeragel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied, Leipzig, 1864-77 (repr. Hildesheim, 1964), i. 191-3.

50 See Luther, 'Preface to the Burial Hymns (1542)', L W, liii. 325-31. The two hymns were not only used at the burial service: Luther says that 'Mit Fried und Freud' and 'Iam moesta quiesce querela' might also be sung on returning home from the interment.

51 Stahl, Musikgeschichte Liibecks, ii: Geistliche Musik, p. 65. 52 The piece survives in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS 6473. The counterpoint comes under the rubric 'alio

modo' since it follows a less strict contrapuntal treatment of the chorale melody. 53 It is noted in Johann Gottfried Walther's Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732 (repr. Kassel, 1953), 249) and survived

into the nineteenth century. In 1685, Nicolaus Adam Strungk-who later became Berhard's successor as

Kapellmeister in Dresden, and whose peripatetic career included three years as a city musician in Hamburg, where he was an important figure in the early years of that city's opera house-composed one of the greatest commemorative

pieces, his 'Ricercar sopra la morte della mia carissima madre Catharina Maria Stubenrauen'. In this extraordinary piece, Strungk reflects on the death of his mother in a long and complex contrapuntal essay which begins as a 'fuga contraria riversa', where the fugal subject is answered by its exact melodic inversion, and culminates in a section

combining the opening theme with three counter-subjects. Buxtehude's 'Mit Fried und Freud', Flor's Todesgedanken and Strungk's ricercare were all given special mention by Walther in his Musicalisches Lexicon of 1732 (pp. 123, 249, 583). The striking association of death with contrapuntal music was first noticed by Friedrich W. Riedel; see his

Quellenkundliche Beitrage zur Geschichte der Musik fir Tasteninstrumente in der zweiten Hilfte des 17. Jahrhunderts, Munich, 1990, pp. 70, 182.

198

Ex. 3

(a) Bernhard, Prudentia prudentiana, Contrapunctus II

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(b) Buxtehude, 'Mit Fried und Freud', Contrapunctus I

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Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr da

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199

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he would have known and studied them. Flor's title suggests that, like the works of Bernhard and Radek, the counterpoints were not written for a funeral service. Rather, Flor's collection might be seen as a form of contemplation on death by the composer, who, through the publication of his music, offered these thoughts as an exemplar of reflection for those who acquired the volume.4

Because the final moments of life marked the crucial battle between Christ and the Devil, between salvation and damnation, concerted thinking about one's death was an essential part of personal religious education. Martin Luther's 'Sermon on Preparing to Die', which continued to exert a profound effect on funerary homiletics throughout the seventeenth century,55 exhorted his followers to prepare early for their dying hour: 'We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance'.56 Collections of funeral sermons, such as Johann Heermann's widely circulated Schola mortis: Todes-Schule ('School of Death'), promised to teach readers how 'to die blessedly' ('selig sterben') and encouraged them to prepare for their deaths through study.57 As a careful, technical contemplation of death, Flor's now lost collection would have taken its place alongside the works of Bernhard and Buxtehude in the widespread literature of moral uplift of which the volumes of funeral sermons formed the largest part.58 As the text of Buxtehude's 'Klagelied' makes clear through repeated references to his blessedness, Johannes Buxtehude was well prepared for death; perhaps these preparations included study of his son's funerary counter- points of 1671.

These essays in double counterpoint constitute a complex of works revolving around a particular musical practice, and perhaps even the contrapuntal scheme of a single piece, Berhard's Prudentia prudentiana. But it could well be the case that Berhard himself had based his piece on a prior work, and that these surviving north German compositions are only a remnant of a more widespread practice of ruminating on death by way of strict counterpoint.59 Most interpretations of these complicated works have seen them as tributes glorifying the deceased; thus the technical procedures of 'Mit Fried und Freud' and its model Prudentia prudentiana would have served as a symbol of the intellectual kinship between composers and dedicatees.60 Indeed, the laudatory aspect of these pieces' technical accomplishment is certainly a crucial part of their meaning: as the title-page of Fried- und Freudenreiche Hinfarth suggests, the main work of according posthumous fame ('nachruhme') to Johannes Buxtehude was done by the two counterpoints.

But learned counterpoint carried a further significance that perhaps explains its 54 Like the collections of Buxtehude and Bernhard, Flor's Todesgedanken would certainly have been published in open

score, a format which encouraged this type of serious study. 55 Zeller, 'Leichenpredigt und Erbauungsliteratur', p. 73. 56 Luther, 'A Sermon on Preparing to Die', LW, xlii. 101. 57 Winkler, Die Leichenpredigt im deutschen Luthertum bis Spener, p. 144. For an account of perhaps the most famous of

such preparations, those of Heinrich Posthumus, which included the commissioning of Schiitz's Musicalische Exequien, see Johnston, 'Rhetorical Personification of the Dead in 17th-Century German Funeral Music'.

58 If Meno Hanneken's funeral counterpoint was not the same piece performed atJohannes Buxtehude's burial, then this would be yet another work to add to this complex.

5' The music examples found in theoretical sources contain further links between death and the strict style of invertible counterpoint. In the Tractatus compositionis augmentatus (ed. Miller-Blattau, p. 125) Bernhard demonstrated invertible counterpoint at the twelfth with an example based on the communion and burial chorale 'Aus tiefer Noth schrei ich zu dir'. In the 'Sweelinck' composition treatise, the Passion chorale 'O Mensch, bewein' dein' Siinde gross' serves as the cantus firmus for a four-part canon. Later in the treatise, the chorale 'Wenn wir in hochsten N6then sein', the text of which is closely related to 'Aus tiefer Noth', provides the cantus firmus for two different double canons, one

by John Bull and the other probably by Sweelinck. See J. P. Sweelinck: Werken, x: Compositions-Regeln, pp. 76-7, 83-4. 60 Cf. Kerala J. Snyder, 'Buxtehude's Studies in Learned Counterpoint', Journal of the American Musicological Society,

xxxiii (1980), 544-64.

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intimate association with death and consolation. Buxtehude wrote two laudatory poems which were published in Werckmeister's composition treatise Harmonologia musica (1702).61 By that time Werckmeister, organist in the central German town of Quedlinburg and a prolific theorist and avid antiquarian, had probably already acquired a large collection of Buxtehude's music, including his setting of 'Mit Fried und Freud'.62 Buxtehude's contrapuntal essay may even have been in Werckmeister's mind when he wrote in the Harmonologia of the 'amazing harmonies ['wunderlichen harmonien'] of double counterpoint' and its mysterious properties which were 'nearly beyond the understanding of men' ('fast fiber den Verstand des Menschen sind').63 In his other writings, Werckmeister reflects further on the meaning of learned counter- point and is awed by the 'wonderful inversions of double counterpoint and canon' ('wunderliche Versetzung in Harmonia Geminata und Fugis Ligatis').64 But Werck- meister is not simply astounded by the properties of double counterpoint and canon; he also attempts to understand them through allegory. One such interpretative effort in the Harmonologia hinges on a comparison between the movement of voices in invertible counterpoint and the motion of planets, where cosmology and harmony are manifesta- tions of the same universal principle:

The heavens are now revolving and circulating steadily so that one [body] now goes up but in another time it changes again and comes down ... We also have these mirrors of heaven and nature in musical harmony, because a certain voice can be the highest voice, but can become the lowest or middle voice, and the lowest and middle can again become the highest. One voice can become all other voices and no other voice must be added, and at the very least ... four voices can be transformed in different ways in good harmony.65

In the appendix which concludes the Harmonologia, Werckmeister again ponders the relationship between cosmological order and invertible counterpoint, stating that a piece in invertible counterpoint can reach its perfection in its 'inversion' ('replica') and is therefore 'a mirror of nature and of God's order' ('ein Spiegel der Natur und Ordnung Gottes').66 Werckmeister gives musical form to this allegorical conception in a four-part setting of the chorale 'Vater unser im Himmelreich', employing invertible counterpoint at the octave and the twelfth, presenting ten of the possible permutations; he does not conclude the piece but simply writes 'and so forth' ('u.s.w.'), suggesting that these combinations could be continued until the musical system returns to its original configuration, the progression of the voices re-creating in microcosm the cycles of the planets.67 The constant motion of the heavens is thus analogous to the perpetual

61 For the poems along with English translations, see idem, Dieterich Buxtehude, p. 127. 62 Werckmeister probably owned a copy of Buxtehude's 'Mit Fried und Freud' given that Johann Gottfried Walther,

who examined the work closely in his own composition treatise, the Praecepta der musicalischen Composition of 1708 (ed. Peter Benary ('Jenaer Beitrage zur Musikforschung', ii), Leipzig, 1955, p. 187), must have received his copy from Werckmeister. Walther mentions his acquisition of Werckmeister's collection of Buxtehude manuscripts in two letters to Heinrich Bokemeyer of 6 August and 3 October 1729; see J. G. Walther: Briefe, ed. Klaus Beckmann & Hans- Joachim Schulze, Leipzig, 1987, pp. 62-83, esp. p. 70; Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, pp. 126-8.

63 Werckmeister, Harmonologia musica, p. 89. 6 Andreas Werckmeister, Musicae mathematicae Hodegus curiosus, 2nd edn., Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1687 (repr.

Hildesheim, 1972), 108; see also pp. 137-8. 65 Werckmeister, Harmonologia musica, dedication, p. [v]: 'Wie nun der Himmel in steter revolution und Circulation

stehet, da dasjenige, was ietzo oben gehet, eine andere Zeit wieder verandert wird und unten komt, also ist solche Circulation in und an der Erdkugel: . . . Diesen Himmels- und Natur-Spiegel haben wir auch in der Musicalischen harmonia, denn diejenige Stimme so da oben gehet, kann wieder die unterste und mittelere werden, und die untersten und mitleren k6nnen wieder die oberen werden, also daB eine Stimme alle Stimmen werden kan, und keine andere Stimme darzu oder davon k6mt, und doch zum wenigsten 4. Stimmen ... mit einander in guter harmonia verwechselt werden'.

66Ibid., p. 101. 67 Ibid., pp. 90-93. There are 24 possible configurations of the four voices.

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revolution of the parts in a well constructed piece of double counterpoint, whose inversions mirror the perfection of heaven and provide earthly beings with a glimpse of God's unending order, a prelude to the heavenly concert. But the relationship between these phenomena was more than merely similitude: the mechanics of the heavens were not simply manifested in double counterpoint but were allegorized by its workings. Bernhard's choice of the word 'revolutio' for the contrapuntally inverted verses of Prudentia prudentiana is suggestive, resonating as it does with the celestial metaphor. Buxtehude, too, would have been frequently reminded of heavenly motion by the astronomical clock in Libeck's Marienkirche with its elaborate planetarium charting the movements of the planets, and he composed a now lost set of suites depicting their individual traits.68

Microcosm was inextricably linked to macrocosm, with counterpoint and the heavens governed by the same fundamental principles. As the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher put it in his Musurgia universalis of 1650, God was 'a taskmaster of order, the guiding principle of everything' (in Hirsch's 1662 translation, '[ein Zuchtmeister] in der Ordnung, ein Richtschnur aller Ding').69 The frontispiece to the Musurgia universalis, a work known to virtually all German music theorists, including Werckmeister, depicts the link between the heavenly order and counterpoint (see P1. II).70 In heaven-high above the underworld and the earth-two angels carry a banner displaying a 36-voice perpetual canon for nine four-voice choirs. Seated in the lower left-hand coner is Pythagoras, the discoverer of the proportions of the universe and the most successful researcher into God's order. The canon-an elaboration of a major triad-is given in the centre of the banner, and the nine choirs of angels sing above it. Later in the treatise, Kircher demonstrates that the music notated on the banner can be expanded to more than a thousand voices.71 As a representation of infinite consonance, the canon illustrates Kircher's belief that the universe is thoroughly organized, and that learned counterpoint, unending and perfectly proportioned, is the music of the heavenly choir, the 'Himmels-Chor' to which Johannes Buxtehude is called in the final line of the concluding strophe of the 'Klagelied'. Kircher's engraving provided the model for the frontispiece of Johann Rist's collection of devotional songs-with melodies supplied by Thomas Selle, Bernhard's predecessor as Kantor of Hamburg's Johanneum-which was published in 1651 in Lineburg, only a year after the appearance of Kircher's Musurgia universalis (see PI. III).72 There are only slight modifications to the engraving in Rist's version, and the canon is identical.

The allegorical potential of double counterpoint and its close companion, canon, was a theme frequently taken up by a circle of Buxtehude's contemporaries, many of whom had studied with his friend Johann Theile. For Georg Osterreich, a collector of

68 Snyder, Dieterich Buxtehude, pp. 76-8. 69 Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis, Rome, 1650 (repr. Hildesheim, 1970); trans. Andreas Hirsch, Germaniae

redonatus: sive Artis magnae de consono et dissono ars minor, Schwabisch-Hall, 1662, p. i. 70 The engraving is by F. Baronius after Paul Schor. 71 Kircher, Musurgia universalis, p. 584. 72 Johann Rist, Sabbahtische Seelenlust (Liineburg, 1651). Kathi Meyer-Baer discusses both frontispieces in her Music of

the Spheres: the Harmony of the Spheres and the Dance of Death, Princeton, 1970, pp. 210-12. According to Marpurg, the canon shared by the Rist and Kircher frontispieces had previously been falsely attributed to Selle, probably because he

supplied the music for Sabbahtische Seelenlust; it was in fact composed by the Italian contrapuntist Romani Micheli. See Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Abhandlung von der Fuge, Berlin, 1753-4 (repr. Hildesheim, 1970), ii. 71-4. Christian Flor also provided the melodies for another collection of Rist's sacred song texts, the Neues musicalisches Seelenparadies, published in Hamburg between 1660 and 1662; see Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, p. 249. Buxtehude set texts from several of Rist's widely distributed volumes of poetry, and although no Buxtehude settings of texts from Sabbahtische Seelenlust survive, it is likely that he would have known the volume; see Geck, Die Vokalmusik Dietrich Buxtehudes und der

friThe Pietismus, pp. 210, 224-6.

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PLATE II

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Buxtehude's vocal music and pupil of Theile in the 1680s, double counterpoint and canon were concrete manifestations of the 'order of God' ('Ordnung Gottes'), and their elaboration revealed the inexplicable essence of God's creation, not merely as a metaphor for God's order but as a concrete realization of it.73 For another of Theile's followers, Johann Philipp Fortsch, learned counterpoint was a profoundly meaningful distillation, a purified form in which 'the unfathomableness of music' ('Unergriin- dlichkeit der Music') was most clearly to be perceived.74 Osterreich's pupil Heinrich Bokemeyer-who inherited his teacher's library of counterpoint treatises and music, including works by Buxtehude-believed that canon and double counterpoint confronted most directly the ineffable 'mystery of harmony' ('mysterium harmoni- cum').75 For Bokemeyer the perpetual canon which allowed for contrapuntal inversion was not only the apogee of musical accomplishment but also a metaphor for God's original creation of the universe and of heavenly harmony. In a passage which illustrates the persistent allegorical importance of strict counterpoint in musical discourse well into the eighteenth century, Bokemeyer mythologizes the moment of revelation when the archetypal contrapuntist discovers his first infinite and invertible canon:

There he finds the beginning and end bound together and has discovered the perpetual canon in order to remind him of the eternal unending origins as well as the harmony of all eternity, as a rule of nature of the most perfect example of his artistic work.76

Canonic cycles here allegorize planetary motion and the music it generates, the harmony of the spheres-'the harmony of all eternity'. Bokemeyer's frequent corres- pondentJohann Gottfried Walther, who owned many of Buxtehude's works, including 'Mit Fried und Freud', also recognized the metaphorical dimension of such music; in a letter to Bokemeyer he included a perpetual canon 'in which it is impossible for all the voices to stop at once, and which accordingly can represent a kind of eternity'.77 Canon and double counterpoint offered real proof, both audible (in performance) and visible (through contrapuntal study), of the hidden intricacies and manifest order in God's universe.

Buxtehude's setting of 'Mit Fried und Freud' fostered a contemplation of the mysteries of its musical techniques and by extension the mysteries of the universe. This dispassionate attitude appears especially marked when compared with the emotional urgency of the 'Klagelied'. But Buxtehude's funerary counterpoints were more than simply 'thoughts on death', for in fact they engaged the mourners (and listeners/ students) as directly as did the 'Klagelied'. Although 'Mit Fried und Freud' did not appease the senses, it provided for a kind of ecstasy transcending the gratification afforded by the music of the passions. In order to be effective, the contrapuntal allegory required the active involvement of the listener/student who was to imagine the workings of the heavens through invertible counterpoint's unique procedures. The contemplation of compositional technique led to thoughts of death and heaven, and

73 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS theor. 1038, f. 35. 74Musicalischer Compositions Tractat, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS theor. 300, f. 33. 75Heinrich Bokemeyer in Johann Mattheson, Critica musica, Hamburg, 1722-5 (repr. Amsterdam, 1964), ii. 328. 76 Bokemeyer in Mattheson, Critica musica, ii. 342-3: 'Da findet er nun den Anfang und Ende verkniipffet, und hat den Canonem infinitum, um sich des ewigen und unendlichen Ursprungs, wie auch der in alle Ewigkeit bestehenden

Harmonie, zu erinner, als eine Regul der Natur, zum vollkommensten Muster aller seine Kunst-Arbeit'. 77 Walther to Bokemeyer, 4 April 1729, in J. G. Walther: Briefe, ed. Beckmann & Schulze, pp. 32-4: 'in welcher alle Stimmen zugleich miteinander unm6glich aufh6ren, und demnach einen typum der Unendlichkeit darstellen konnen'. The canon to which is he referring is 'Keiicheste Flammen brennt ewiglich fort!', the text of which describes eternal flames.

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further engagement with the musical argument of Buxtehude's funerary counterpoints allowed for an anticipation of the perpetual celebration of the risen, purified spirit, offer a foretaste of the unimaginable joys of the transfigured body. In comparison with the transitory passions of the modem style, this was powerful stuff.

As a symbol of constancy in a 'troubled and anxiety-wracked world', to cite Buxtehude's title-page, invertible counterpoint offered consolation and assurance in times of mourning, a music above earthly tribulation. As a statement of belief, funerary counterpoints appeared as timeless as the universal truths they allegorized. And as music freed from the body, these pieces traced the ascent of the soul to heaven. But it was through allegory that the exacting contrapuntal procedures of these funerary tributes achieved their most profound, if also most mysterious, meaning, an evocation of the heavenly order to which the blessed would be called. While the 'Klagelied', beautiful in torment, was music of immediacy and catharsis, 'Mit Fried und Freud' was a prelude to eternity, an echo of Johannes Buxtehude playing the heavenly keyboard.

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