A wandering Canadian: Goodbye Bach, Hello Buxtehude...

The morning after our Bachfest performance, it was time to say goodbye to Leipzig and get on a 6 hour bus ride to Lübeck, but first I had to go and say goodbye to the Thomaskirche. I still hadn’t fully processed everything from the night before and felt I needed to go back into that space one more time before we left. There was a rehearsal going on, so I sat and listened to the organ above me, closed my eyes and imagined I was back in Bach’s time. I thought about what we had done there the night before and it seemed almost like a perfect dream. I remembered bits and pieces of it and replayed them in my head, feeling more of the experience now that I could relax and just think about it.

After about ten or so minutes, I had to say goodbye and make my way to where the tour bus was waiting. Dankeshön I thought in my head as I slowly walked out, directing it towards the grave at the front. And I probably imagined this, but I felt as if I heard a voice in my head whisper Bitteshön...

***

Whether or not going on tour makes you hear voices, one thing it can be for sure is exhausting.

After dropping our luggage off in the hotel, we immediately walked over to the Marienkirche, where the composer Buxtehude worked as organist from 1668 until the end of his life in 1707.

In 1705, when he was only 20 years old, Bach actually walked over 400 kilometres from Arnstadt to Lübeck in order to meet Buxtehude, hear his music and learn from him:

“We don't know, exactly, what it was the made Bach want to undertake the trip. Buxtehude did have a considerable reputation, at least among musicians, and Bach, a young man of twenty, was in his first job as a church organist. (...) Bach may have felt very constrained by the limited resources in town, as well as being motivated by the urge that every ambitious young musician feels to make contact with other musicians, to learn from them, and thus improve their own art. One thing should be stressed--had Bach been content to simply stay at home and do the job for which he had been hired, and not gone forth to confront and learn from the best that German art had to offer at the time, he wouldn't have been Bach.”
Quoted from: http://www.pianonoise.com/Composer.Buxtehude.htm

That thirst and desire to seek out new learning experiences, to travel, to go where your heart leads you no matter what the effort, is something I think a lot of people can relate to. I have done similar, though perhaps not quite so extreme, things in my life. My commute to Ottawa from Toronto almost every weekend to sing in this choir is something a lot of people don’t understand. I also do a lot of other things that people don't really understand in the name of passion. I just jump in and find some way to make it work as I go. So yeah, walking 400 km to go learn from a famous musician... I kind of get that.

This artwork depicts what I assume
is Buxtehude at the organ and a shy (?)
Bach standing behind him and listening

Bach took a month’s leave from his position at his first job in order to undertake this pilgrimage. However, while he was there, he discovered that Buxtehude put on a series of concerts known as “Abendmusik” on the Sundays during Advent... which he obviously wanted to attend. As the above quoted website goes on to explain,

“Bach was now faced with a tough choice. If he stuck around for the concerts, he would be overstaying his leave, and the church authorities would not be very happy. On the other hand, to miss such concerts! (...) Bach decided to stay. He was not about to wait another year for this seminal influence on his art, something of great importance to him (...) That doesn't, however, make his behavior anything less than rude.

When he returned home, the church authorities let him know it. A fascinating transcript survives of the "minutes" of a meeting to which Bach was called to explain himself. By this time it was well into February. Bach had not only remained through Christmas, he found reasons to stay for another month and a half, causing him to return nearly four months late.”

I guess you would call him rebellious.

We, however, did not walk to Lübeck. As we approached Buxtehude’s church, we were not prepared for the sheer enormity of it. I have never seen a church as immense as this. And I’ve certainly seen large buildings, but none with as much... presence, as this one. It just occupies so much... space. We marvelled at it from the outside for a while...

...and then we went inside.

Pictures don’t do this place justice. The high, high ceilings were a sight to take in. We all kept wandering around, staring upwards.

Inside the church looking towards the front

The acoustic was incredible once we started singing. It took at least ten seconds for the sound to decay. The sound of our voices would rise up into those high ceilings, float around in different places, and come back to you from somewhere else. The richness of sound was amazing. Who knew that Buxtehude’s church was like this? Even though the church was largely destroyed during WWII and rebuilt, they stayed close to the original height and shape of the ceilings so the acoustic must have been very similar back in his time. It gave me a whole new perspective on his music, and it was pretty special to sing a piece by him in that space.

I feel so lucky that I get to have these experiences, both on this tour and the other one I was on two years ago. It gives me a whole new depth and intimacy with this music and these composers. They don’t just seem like names on a page and a series of facts... they were real people, and I have now walked in the same places they have, and sung their music in the exact same spaces they were conceived and meant to be sung.