Monteverdi Choir – “Buxtehude’s Daughter”

In English, we customarily tell someone unwanted to “get lost”. In parts of Germany however, they are customarily told to go to a specific place instead: “Go to Buxtehude” – a town near Hamburg. “Buxtehude” was also the name of a Danish-German composer (first name: Dieterich), and as he grew old and looked for a possible successor, there was many a German musician who (literally) went to Buxtehude – but then slunk off again. His post as organist and church treasurer at St Mary’s Church in Lübeck was undoubtedly attractive, though there was a catch for anyone seeking to succeed him.

Back in 1668, Buxtehude himself had married his predecessor’s daughter, namely one Anna Margaretha Tunder. This was presumably not a condition of the post at the time, but may well have been of benefit to him when assuming it. And when it came to finding his own successor, he stipulated that a similar arrangement should be made – but a binding one. Anyone wishing to take up his post had to marry the eldest of his unmarried daughters, Anna Margreta, who was 28 at the time. This practice is impossible to comprehend from our perspective, but was by no means unusual at the time. It also served as an early kind of social security for a man’s family in the event of his death. But all the same, the arrangement seems to have deterred prominent candidates from applying. In 1703, Johann Mattheson (then aged 21) and George Frideric Handel (18) both travelled to Lübeck, auditioned on various instruments, but then, as Mattheson himself reported, both politely declined to pursue employment when “a condition of marriage was proposed as part of the arrangement, for which neither of us showed the slightest inclination”. Two years later, in 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach also went to Lübeck – a journey of some 450 kilometres that he covered on foot – in order to hear the old master Buxtehude play the organ and to learn from him. It remains unclear whether or not he was also toying with the idea of submitting an application for his job. Buxtehude finally found a successor one year later, in 1706: one Johann Christian Schieferdecker, who was appointed to Buxtehude’s post on the latter’s death in 1707, and married Anna Margreta that same year.

This concert takes all these personal connections as its starting point. It features the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists – two heavyweights of the music scene, both of them founded by Sir John Eliot Gardiner – that have made a name for themselves far beyond the realms of the Baroque. Their programme, dedicated to the musical worlds of “Buxtehude’s daughter”, comprises works by Franz Tunder, George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach and Dieterich Buxtehude himself.