Page:Romain Rolland Handel.djvu/37

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HIS LIFE
29

renowned organist, Dietrich Buxtehude.[1] Buxtehude had thoughts of retiring, and was looking for a successor. The two young men were greatly affected by his talent, but they did not care to succeed him in the post, for it was necessary to wed his daughter[2] to have his organ, and, said Mattheson, "neither of them wanted her."—Two years later they would have met on the road to Lubeck a young musician also going, like them, to pay Buxtehude a visit, not like them, however, in a carriage, but more humbly on foot: J. S. Bach.[3] Nothing makes us realise the importance of Buxtehude in German music better than this magnet-like attraction which he exercised over the German musicians of the eighteenth century. Pirro has remarked at some length his influence on the organ style of J. S. Bach. I consider that it was no less marked, though quite different, on the oratorio style of Handel.[4]

  1. See in the Ehrenpforte the story of this journey, and the frolics which happened on the way to the two joyful companions.

    Buxtehude was a Dane, born at Elsinore in 1637. He settled at Lubeck, where he remained as the organist of St. Mary's Church, from the age of thirty years until his death in 1707.

  2. It was the custom that the organ of a church should be given with the daughter, or the widow of the organist. Buxtehude himself, in succeeding Tunder, had married his daughter.
  3. J. S. Bach went to Lubeck in October, 1705, and instead of staying a month, as arranged, he spent four months there; an irregularity which cost him his position at Celle.
  4. The organ works of Buxtehude have been republished by Spitta and Max Seiffert, in 2 volumes by Breitkopf (see the short, but pithy, study of Pirro in his little book on L'Orgue de J. S. Bach, Paris, 1895, and Max Seiffert: Buxtehude, Handel, Bach, in the Peter's Annual, 1902). A selection (too restricted) of the cantatas has been published in a volume of the Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst. Pirro is preparing a longer work on Buxtehude.