Program Notes by Dr. Kerry McCarthy

“Sung with the most humble devotion of my whole heart”: that was how the composer and organist Dieterich Buxtehude described his Membra Jesu Nostri on the handwritten title page he made for it. Not all of Buxtehude’s music is humble. Some of his organ works are brilliantly bizarre, with the furious virtuosity of a musician who inspired the young J. S. Bach to travel halfway across Germany just to hear him improvise. The music we are singing and playing tonight shows a different side of his personality.

Membra Jesu Nostri is a meditation, in seven movements, on the body of the crucified Christ on Good Friday. (The general form will be familiar to anyone who heard Cantores sing MacMillan’s Seven Last Words in 2022; the mood of the two pieces could hardly be more different.) Most of the words are taken from a medieval Latin poem that had become a devotional classic, treasured by Lutherans and Catholics alike, by the time Buxtehude set it to music in 1680. He gave the individual verses of the poem to various combinations of solo voices, along with short passages of scripture sung by the full choir. The singing is broken up by brief interludes for strings and organ that allow some time to reflect more deeply on what is happening. In many ways this is a companion work to Biber’s fifteen Rosary Sonatas, which also use the whole range of baroque musical expression to meditate on the mysteries of salvation.

Buxtehude’s style here owes a lot to Monteverdi and his Italian successors, who were such experts in music of love and longing. Much of the Membra is in various dance-like versions of triple time, with some surprisingly joyful passages. The second-to-last movement, Ad cor, addressing the heart of Christ, creates a new sound by adding the warmth of viols to the mix. The viola da gamba was the most intimate and “indoors” of baroque instruments, to be played in quiet, private chambers – fitting

for the most hidden and delicate part of the body. 

The walls of Buxtehude’s own church in Lübeck had been stripped of their monumental murals and religious art after the Reformation. When his listeners wanted to reflect on the mysteries of Holy Week, they often turned to small pictures that were printed for private devotion, just the right size for a person to bring to church and contemplate quietly. Some of those pictures were captioned with

the same words that Buxtehude set to music.

Ut te quaeram mente pura,

sit haec mea prima cura...

Let this be my first thought,

to seek you with a pure heart...

Buxtehude dedicated the Membra to his Swedish friend Gustav Düben, a great connoisseur of instrumental and choral works whose collection included (among many other things) music by Byrd and Tomkins. The title page in Buxtehude’s own calligraphy is from the only surviving copy, which he sent to Düben as a gift. It was filed away in a library near Stockholm after his death and did not resurface until the late nineteenth century. This pungent meditation on the wounds of Christ was not

very fashionable when it was first rediscovered, at a time when extreme suffering and vulnerability was safely hidden away in whitewashed, soundproof wards. Membra Jesu Nostri was not recorded for the first time until 1968. It is now one of the best-loved musical works of the baroque era, and justly recognized as one of the most beautiful.