Buxtehude’s Daughter

for Alec Bolton, in memoriam

In the first decade of the eighteenth century the old Hansa city of Lübeck in North Germany was the home of the finest organist in Europe, Dikerick, or, as he is usually called, Dietrich Buxtehude. His greatness as a performer, but also as a composer of church chorales and concerti, had spread the name of Marienkirche through all the German states, so that when the time came to consider his successor young men from all over Germany and the north, even as far as Sweden, began to appear in Lübeck to declare an interest and show their parts, though a good many of them, out of pride or professional caution, gave out that their only reason for coming was to pay their respects to the master and hear him play.

They watched one another closely, these unofficial candidates. Slipping into a pew at vespers when some rival was performing, they would sit with their head on one side, measuring their talent, assessing their chances, and then either present themselves to the Lübeck councillors or slip away. They would also take a look, but discreetly and without drawing attention to themselves, at the old man’s daughter, Margarethe, since it had been decided, after some quaint old-German custom that went with the gables and gothic såpires of the place, that the man who succeeded the father should also marry the daughter. Old Buxtehude had married the daughter of his predecessor, Franz Tunder, lived with her quite happily, and produced five daughters, of whom Margarethe, at this time, was the only survivor.

She was in her early thirties. Herself a talented performer, and with a high regard for music as a sacred art, she took great pride in her father’s position, and it was this perhaps that saved her from what might otherwise have been merely humiliating, the little matter, which was strange in modern times, of being thrown in as it were as an extra to the main chance – or, in the darker view, which even she was forced to take on occasion, as an obligation to be assumed or hurdle to be got over. She was a strong young woman with a clear sense of her place in the world and she let the candidates, or contestants or suitors, know it, amusing herself by looking on the affair as one of those folk-tales in which a penniless beggar or soldier of fortune tries for the hand of a princess, for a kingdom too, but at the risk of his head.

As time passed, and the number of rejected candidates grew, it soon got about that the real stumbling-block to the succession was the marriage clause. Young fellows who had no doubt as to their ability, in half an hour or so at the Marienkirche organ, to impress old Buxtehude and the city fathers, would find themselves shivering and shaking when they presented themselves afterwards, hat in hand and with the keen wind of the Baltic whistling past their ears, at the master’s door.

Two of these candidates had been invited to apply and came in the same carriage – an odd pair. They were from Hamburg.

The elder (he was twenty-two) was the director of the Opera there, the composer of several works in the Italian style in which he himself took a leading part, since he was one of the city’s most accomplished singers. His name was Mattheson.

The other, his colleague at the Opera, and equally famous, though he was barely eighteen, was a pretty youth with golden hair and the complexion, the manners too, of a girl. He played second violin in the Hamburg orchestra, sometimes conducted from the harpsichord and already had a reputation as organist and improviser.

There was a good deal of gossip about the pair. They were inseparable and were renowned in Hamburg for their quarrels, which often took place in public; at rehearsals, in coffee houses, even once or twice in the street. These confrontations were extremely passionate, sometimes ending in blows and on one occasion, in the case of the younger, whose name was Handel, in tears. They had come to Lübeck to survey the prospects and to decide between themselves which, if either, would accept the post. They did not act like rivals. They sang and played together, praised each other’s performances, went boating on the Trave, at table kept up a constant mockery, one of the other, that was meant perhaps to keep their spirits up but was also, their hostess suspected, part of a private joke. The younger could scarcely contain his giggles. They were gallant enough – they had excellent manners – but they treated her, she felt, like a mere adjunct, a supernumerary chattel or comic codicil, and she was mortified to think what they might have to say to one another in a more unbuttoned state, when they had retired to the attic room that had been found for them; how they would pile up witticisms at her expense, going further perhaps than they intended in the attempt to outdo each other till they lapsed at last into crude hilarity. (She had seen enough of her father’s choir-boys to have no illusions about the nature of young men.)

What she found most insufferable was the camaraderie between them, which she could not help but feel was an alliance; that and the assumption, in their careless all-conquering manner, that the world was theirs by right, to be divided up just as they pleased. Well, not if she could help it!

But when young Handel seated himself at the organ one evening and, high up in the familiar darkness, began to play, she was overwhelmed by the powers he called down, the light-heartedness and joy he could find among so much grandeur, the grace-notes that really were a sign of grace. Her soul was touched. She shivered as if a finger had been laid directly upon her flesh. If he chose her she would have him – no possibility of denial. And how, she agonised, would she escape humiliation? She sat with her thin shoulders hunched, as pale as paste, while the great eddies of his breath, amplified a hundredfold by bellows and reeds and metal pipes, rolled out over her.

So when it appeared at last that they were not serious, these two, but were there simply to show off and amuse themselves, she was relieved, too conscious of a danger that had been averted to be angry with them, though she had every right to be.

He had been a fearful temptation, this brilliant youth. He might have destroyed her.

She had been let off this time, but she saw where her weakness lay. From now on she would be more wary.

She had a high opinion of what was owing to her father, and young Handel might have satisfied it to the highest pitch; but she had a high opinion as well of what was owing to herself.

Then one day (it was two years later and she was thirty-four) a young man called Bach appeared, that same Bach, Johann Sebastian, who later became so famous, but he was just twenty at this time and still unknown. A sturdy, thickset fellow, he had travelled all the way from Arnstadt, he told them; more than a hundred miles, and on foot. He had come to attend the concert week that took place each year at Christmas, and to sit at the feet of master Buxtehude, and learn. He did not mention the famous vacancy.

Margarethe was impressed. That he appeared ignorant of what had drawn so many others, caring only for music – that, for one thing. That he was rather shabby and had something of the Saxon peasant about him – that next. But most of all that he had come on foot: like a wandering apprentice, but like the hero too of the folk-tale she had imagined herself part of, to alleviate a little the painfulness of her position, which she felt more keenly as she grew older and as the candidates, who got younger each year, came and went. Of course he knew of the vacancy, even if he did not allude to it. So she wondered if his coming on foot, which he quite insisted on, was not intended as a secret sign to her that he too had recognised the shape of an old nursery tale and was playing his part.

In fact no such thought had entered his head. He had come on foot because he was poor, but also because he was young, healthy and wanted the exercise; and further, as he hinted once or twice, because his duties at Arnstadt bored him, and having got permission to absent himself, he wanted to be away for as long as he could be. There was something of his Saxon nature in it too: he liked to approach things slowly. He stayed three months, and she, her father and the Lübeck councillors waited and waited for him to make his intentions clear. He studied, he attended concerts, played on the great Marienkirche organ; nothing was said. He was, it seemed, occupied entirely with his art. It took up the whole of his nature. He was aware of nothing else.

Margarethe held her breath. He was the one who most nearly fulfilled all the conditions, not only of the post but of the story; he would be appointed, they would marry, all would be well. Except that it was not well, and she began to wonder if the tale she had been telling herself was the right one after all.

Music was the sphere he moved in. Everything outside it, the weather, a plate of steaming sauerkraut, the cleanliness or otherwise of the coarse stockings he wore, belonged to a world where, for all his stocky frame and the heartiness of his appetite, he had only the most shadowy existence. There was nothing boorish about him. It was a question of attention. He was fully attentive, his whole flesh and spirit were engaged, only in the one element of music. He would marry; he would get children, and they too, however many there might be of them, and whatever noise and disorder they might create with their messes, their coughs and croups, their little tantrums and temper fits, would be mere shadows for him till they too came into the element – that is, music – and began to be little practisers of scales, a pool of ready copyists, then followers of their father in the musical line.

Well, it was a great and noble craft and she too cared for it. Wasn’t she too in the musical line, hadn’t she too made a world of it? But the fact was, she had no wish to get her children, or have them begotten, in a shadowy way. When all was said and done she cared less for music (this was blasphemy, she knew) than for life, by which she meant her own life, the life that was in her. So she gave him no sign, and was pretty certain that if she had he would have missed it. She let her prince go on sleep-walking, and when he had learned all he could, or began to worry that the patience of his employers back at Arnstadt might be wearing thin, he packed his bags, thanked them, and went away.

In later years, when the news of his greatness reached her, she remembered him with amusement but without regret. His works, and later the works of his sons as well, were performed at the Marienkirche music-weeks, which continued after her father’s death, but Lübeck was no longer a centre by then. The magic had moved elsewhere.

And she did marry. Three months after her father’s death, at the altar of the Marienkirche, she married her father’s assistant, Johann Christian Schieferdecker, a man of moderate talent but by no means incompetent, and he was at the same time confirmed in the vacancy. They had several children and she lived happily in Lübeck till the end of her days. As an old lady she liked to walk with her eldest daughter on the beach at Travemünde, telling her grandchildren of the famous men who had come to Lübeck to visit and pay their respects, and urging the smallest of them, as she looked across to Denmark where her father’s people had come from, to listen for the song of the mermaids who lure sailors in the strait.