Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637-1707) occupied the organ bench of the Marienkirche in Lübeck for nearly forty years, and in that position he created an institution that shaped the entire subsequent history of German sacred music. The Abendmusiken - evening concerts held on the five Sundays before Christmas - were his most ambitious creation: large-scale concerts of sacred music performed for the civic community of Lübeck that combined organ music, vocal soloists, choir, and orchestra in a format without precedent in German Protestant worship. Admirers traveled long distances to hear them, including the twenty-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach, who in the winter of 1705-1706 walked over 400 kilometers from Arnstadt to Lübeck, stayed for three months, and returned a transformed composer.
Buxtehude's sacred cantatas drew from the full range of Lutheran biblical piety. The Psalms - particularly the Psalms of praise (Psalm 150, Psalm 98, Psalm 96) and the Psalms of lament (Psalm 22, Psalm 51, Psalm 130) - provided the textual foundation for many of his works, set alongside Lutheran chorales, freely composed devotional poetry, and passages from Paul's epistles. His approach to text-setting was rhetorical in the fullest Baroque sense: every word carried its musical weight, every phrase of Scripture was matched to a musical gesture that illuminated its theological meaning.
His most celebrated work is 'Membra Jesu Nostri patientis sanctissima' (BuxWV 75, composed 1680) - a cycle of seven cantatas meditating on the wounds of Christ, each dedicated to a different part of the suffering body: feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, and face. The texts draw from a medieval Latin poem attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, which itself weaves together the Passion narratives of the Gospels with the erotic imagery of the Song of Solomon applied to Christ in the medieval mystical tradition. Psalm 22's description of pierced hands and feet, John 19:34's account of the soldier piercing Christ's side, and Song of Solomon 5:4's 'my beloved thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him' converge in a meditation that is simultaneously exegetically complex and devotionally intense.
The seventh cantata of the cycle, 'Ad faciem' ('To the face'), is the culmination of the entire sequence: having meditated on each wound in turn, the singer arrives at the face of Christ - the ultimate destination of Christian contemplation, drawing on 1 Corinthians 13:12's promise that 'now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known' and on Matthew 17:2's Transfiguration, where Jesus's 'face shone like the sun.' The devotional trajectory of the whole cycle mirrors the mystical tradition's ascent from external to internal, from body to soul, from suffering to glory.
Buxtehude's influence on Bach is difficult to overstate. The trip to Lübeck was not merely a pilgrimage of admiration; it was a formative encounter with the most sophisticated sacred music tradition in German Lutheranism. Bach's subsequent development of the cantata form, his use of Lutheran chorales as the structural backbone of extended sacred works, and his theology of the Passion are all deeply indebted to Buxtehude's example.
For Lutheran theology, Buxtehude's cantatas represent the doctrine of the means of grace applied to music: the music itself is a vehicle through which the biblical text reaches the hearer in a way that plain preaching alone cannot. The Reformation's insistence that the word of God must be heard rather than merely observed - Luther's recovery of the sermon as the center of worship - found its musical counterpart in composers like Buxtehude who poured their greatest creative energies into setting that word in sound.
Buxtehude's legacy was obscured for nearly two centuries after his death, as Bach's towering achievement absorbed attention that might otherwise have gone to his predecessor. The twentieth-century revival of early music brought his cantatas back into the concert hall and the church, and they are now recognized as among the finest sacred vocal music of the Baroque period - works that prove that the tradition Bach brought to its height was already fully alive before he arrived.