article 168: THOUGHTS ON THE HANSEATIC CHORALE FANTASIA FOR ORGAN, or ARTICLES 160 and 165 CONTINUED My recent perusal of Bach’s organ chorales had me so fascinated by the tunes themselves that I decided to reach back to earlier masters. First, to Jan Adam Reincken (1643-1722) from Deventer, a member city of the Hanseatic League in my adopted homeland, the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The famous story of his meeting in Hamburg with J. S. Bach was the link. Bach visited the old man (not aged 99, as previously believed) at St. Catherine’s and had the temerity to improvise on An Wasserflüssen Babylon, considered the Dutchman’s property. This brought the chorale fantasia into view. I got out my ancient LP performance by Gustav Leonhardt at Noordbroek, and was thoroughly hooked. Wanting contemporary works for comparison, I first thought of Matthias Weckmann (ca.1616-1674), a protégé of Schütz who escaped from Dresden to seek the organs and organists of Hamburg. In one of his chorale fantasias I stumbled on the form’s greatest monument. Fascination ensued, hence the following overview. The chorale fantasia – a useful 19th-century German classification – became the main vehicle for organists’ showmanship in Northern Germany for the better part of the 17th century. The form circulated among cities of the old Hanseatic League, which regulated water-borne trade on the North and Baltic Seas. Its basic shape remained constant: each line of the chorale is treated separately, first in motet style, in a quiet registration with pedal. Then a solo line in the Rückpositiv appears, which ornaments the chorale in fast note values, with the melody notes struck on main beats. There can be any number of such solos per chorale line, and they use the whole range of the keyboard; usually in figuration reminiscent of the old “colorists” or Sweelinck himself, but sometimes using elaborate arpeggios and repeated notes. Thematic entrances appear on the quiet manual (usually the Oberwerk) and pedal, during and between solos. After a short closing cadenza, subsequent chorale lines are treated in similar fashion. Towards the end a section appears using rapid manual changes to create echo effects. The piece concludes with a virtuoso coda. Where did this remarkable form originate? Reincken studied with the greatest of Sweelinck’s Hamburg students, the agèd Heinrich Scheidemann (1596-1663), and succeeded him at St. Catherine’s. Scheidemann is almost always cited as the “inventor" of the chorale fantasia. His main contributions are found as the third of four verses in his settings of seven of the eight tones of the Magnificat, which were played at Saturday Vespers. A few separate examples round out the picture, though not as many as Pieter Dirksen thinks. Scheidemann may indeed have been the person who stabilized something which had been quite loose into a semi-fixed structure. But two north Germans of Sweelinck’s generation have it in embryonic form: Hieronymus Praetorius (or Schultz, 1560-1629) of Hamburg, and Johann Steffens (ca. 1560-1616) of Lüneburg. Praetorius, besides numerous vocal works, completed the cycle of organ verses on the eight Magnificat tones. Found in the so-called Visby manuscript, they are powerful works in a more archaic style than Scheidemann’s. A few verses explicitly demand two manuals, and many other passages lend themselves to solo/tutti performance. Steffens worked in the inland Hanseatic city of Lüneburg, later made famous for music history by Georg Böhm and his protégé, the young choir boy J. S. Bach. Steffens has three surviving chorale settings. That on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, an Advent chorale that shows up often as a vehicle for virtuosity at the organ, is clearly the latest. Its division into three verses is a newer development, and the third has what look like Rückpositiv passages combined with quieter manual and pedal parts, without their being so marked. His single surviving Fantasia looks like an attempt to imitate what was coming from Amsterdam via nearby Hamburg. Returning to the organists who were sent for study to Amsterdam: second in importance after Scheidemann is Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654) of Halle an der Saale. His city had not been a member of the Hanse since 1479, so it may be no coincidence that he has left us no chorale fantasia in Hanseatic style. Hieronymus Praetorius’ two sons Jacob and Johann were both Sweelinck students, and later held top posts in Hamburg. Johann’s works (assuming any were notated) are all lost, but Jacob, who was organist at St. Peter’s, has a significant surviving corpus of organ works which includes a number of splendid chorale fantasias, notably Von allen Menschen abgewandt. His reputation for gravitas caused Schütz to prefer him over Scheidemann as a teacher for Weckmann. Some of Jacob’s organ works can be counted among the most expressive and powerful of the period. The famous Organistenchronik by Johann Kortkamp – about which more later – heaps praise on his memory second only to that accorded Kortkamp’s own teacher, Weckmann. Paul Siefert, organist of Warsaw and Danzig, eldest of the German Sweelinck students in terms of age on arrival in Amsterdam, was involved in a dispute with his Cantor over three decades that makes Bach’s troubles with his Rektor Ernesti look like a tea party. His slim corpus of surviving keyboard pieces is plagued with problems of attribution. The ones which are most secure look like youth works. These include a single brief fantasia on an original theme, found in a Vienna manuscript. It was attached to another anonymous, vastly inferior set of 12 similar pieces, a partial modal cycle, in manuscript now in Leipzig. Beckmann unfortunately included all 13 in his complete Siefert edition. I believe Siefert was the scribe of the main Sweelinck source, Lynar A1, as well as Lynar A2. If true, it means that some of the anonymous works found in A1 are probably his; many were attributed by Seiffert to Sweelinck. A2, as well as manuscripts from the southern Netherlands testify to Siefert’s connections to Antwerp and the Brussels court, possibly via Amsterdam. The Hintze MS, named after a previous owner and now at Yale, is a Weckmann autograph of French-style pieces. At no. 6 there is a short passacaglia by Siefert’s student Balthasar Erben, marked by Weckmann “from Siefert’s book”. Weckmann touched up a couple of Erben’s pieces in the Hintze MS, most likely when Erben passed through Dresden on the way to meet Froberger in Regensburg. The list of important Sweelinck students must also include Melchior Schildt (1593-1667) of Hannover. His city was part of the Hanse because of its navigable river, the Leine. His four outstanding chorale settings often contain elements of the chorale fantasia, but it is the second verse of the five in his Magnificat Primi Toni where he goes all the way, with an extended echo section. Verse 3 is a miniature version of Sweelinck’s Chromatic Fantasia. Schildt’s simple manualiter setting of Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr is very similar indeed to that by his great teacher. Schildt’s harmonies are the most adventurous of the Sweelinck school; they are reminiscent of his master’s little shocks, but go farther, in the manner of a clever student. (I appended a massive, anonymous fantasia of a similarly overzealous nature to my NAXOS Sweelinck CD, with a tentative attribution to Schildt.) The height of madness is reached in the use of D-sharps and a chromatic run down the distance of a 12th at the end of his setting of Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, O Herr. This whole piece looks to me like the best reflection we have of a Sweelinck improvisation on a weekday at the Oude Kerk. How these might have influenced the Hanseatic chorale fantasia will be discussed shortly. *** We come now to the second generation of Sweelinck students. Weckmann and Reincken, students of Jacob Praetorius and Scheidemann respectively, were previously mentioned. Reincken’s An Wasserflüssen Babylon has iconic status because it was the only example of the form to be printed, and even more so because of its connection to Bach. As a piece of music, however, it is not up to the mark set by Scheidemann; there are moments of great beauty, but it wanders, and often seems uninspired. Possibly its most remarkable aspect is the degree of “tone-painting” involved; words in the chorale text are treated according to the principles of musical rhetoric, or Figurenlehre. Musical “figures”, given pseudo-Greek and -Latin names by ponderous theoreticians, attempt to render verbal meaning into sound, sometimes with childish literalness, sometimes more meaningfully. The vast apparatus, which died out in the 18th century, was an ex post facto reaction to the Josquin revolution, when music evolved from mostly mathematics to a vehicle for emotion. The Dutchman Reincken had a slightly older Danish friend, by far the most famous representative of the North German school: Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707). They appear together on the famous triple portrait by Johannes Voorhout, together with Johann Theile. I saw the painting at the home of Hugh Gough in New York, after he acquired it on the art market and before it found its proper place at the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte. Almost nothing is known of Buxtehude’s formation as an organist and composer, but there is no evidence that he can be counted as part of the Sweelinck school. Buxtehude’s chorale fantasias are less impressive than one might have hoped. His interest in strict counterpoint is well-documented, and I think his engagement with the older, wide-ranging, improvisatory form was half-hearted. Any interest in notating such work was extinguished altogether in his mentee, J. S. Bach. It is beyond doubt that Bach knew Theile’s Kunstbuch, a treatise on contrapuntal acrobatics. Stricter forms than the chorale fantasia occupied the mind of the Thomaskantor; even his early toccatas, like those of Buxtehude, are more organized. It’s a different story regarding Buxtehude’s father-in-law and predecessor at St. Mary’s in Lübeck, the brilliant Franz Tunder (1614-1667). Six of his extant organ chorales are fine fantasias in a style which the younger man obviously copied from the Scheidemann/Praetorius school. Weckmann may have been the link; Tunder was best man at his wedding. In the article on Franciscus de Minde, Mattheson’s somewhat unreliable Ehren-Pforte says Tunder studied with Frescobaldi. Be that as it may, there is little if any influence from that master to be found in Tunder. But he may been a major conduit for the more recent motoric and abstract Italianisms that crop up in Germany after mid-century. Further examples of the Hanseatic chorale fantasia are scattered across the surviving body of works by many forgotten masters – some deservedly so, others unjustly. Interesting examples can be found from Danzig, an extremely important Hanseatic center at this time. A student of Siefert deserves mention. Andreas Neunaber (1603-63) has one surviving piece, the only work comprising Lynar B 8 (erroneously attributed to an otherwise unknown “Anton”). It is to my knowledge the earliest work to explicitly demand three manuals and pedal. Ich ruf zu dir Herr Jesu Christ first presents a simple, anonymous setting with the ornamented melody on a solo register, which could be by his teacher Paul Siefert. Neunaber is then named as composer of a chorale fantasia which works through the melody line by line in Hanseatic style, and very nearly at Scheidemann’s level of excellence. His gorgeous organ case from St. John’s in Danzig/Gdansk now takes the place of the lost organ in the main church of St. Mary’s. (Neunaber has an article in New Grove I, but is absent from New Grove II and MGG II. Sic transit gloria librorum consultandorum impressorum.) Two younger contemporaries of Neunaber have chorale fantasias which are not at the same level as his. Another Danziger, Ewald Hintz, or Hinsch (1613-1668), was a Froberger student according to Mattheson’s Ehren-Pforte article on Caspar Forster Junior. The two worked together in Denmark for Frederick III. Hintz’ three-manual layout also shows pedal registration changes, giving the chorale lines to the Posaune. Kortkamp’s Organistenchronik says that the author often pulled stops for Weckmann while he was playing. Nicolaus Hasse (ca. 1617-1672) worked in Rostock, another member of the Hanse. Of his four chorale preludes, that on Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr uses exactly the same 3-manual layout as Hintz, but this may have to do with the fact that their works are found in the same Lublin tablature. Komm Heiliger Geist Herre Gott is a full-blown chorale fantasia, overly long by a factor of three. Klaus Beckmann surprisingly relegates the pedal registration changes to the critical commentary in his edition. The splendidly-named and long-lived Delphin Strungk (1601-94) was Schildt’s successor in Wolfenbüttel, and later took over all the organs in ducal Braunschweig. He has three weak chorale fantasias (two of them embedded in a Magnificat) which are remarkable for being manuals-only. His interminable toccata outdoes Schildt in chromatic runs. And with this decadent figure the trail of the Hanseatic chorale fantasia runs cold. *** Let us return to the question of its origin. Was it really “invented” by Scheidemann? Hamburg’s expanded, independent pedal divisions are considered pivotal, but the earlier organs in the northern Netherlands could handle the parts. The pedals had one or two solo stops and pull-downs from the main divisions which had the necessary range. And anyway, this wasn’t an era when forms were invented; they evolved, slowly. Originality wasn’t the idiotic obsession it became in modern times, and I imagine it was rather frowned upon in early 17th-century Hamburg. So where did all these Hamburg organists who had been to Amsterdam get the idea for the chorale fantasia? I mentioned previously that there were Hamburg locals who were moving in its direction. What about Sweelinck himself? His teaching most likely primarily concerned vocal counterpoint. His rules for composition, based on Zarlino, added to by his German school and redacted by Reincken, point in that direction. His main job as city (not church) organist was to entertain citizens strolling in the Oude Kerk on one of its two organs for an hour daily. I feel certain that what Sweelinck’s students heard, rather than studied on paper, was a major nudge towards the full-fledged chorale fantasia. It is striking in this respect that Sweelinck’s major contribution, the large-scale Fantasia on original subjects, found virtually no resonance in Germany. Only Samuel Scheidt, who rejected the chorale fantasia, pursued the stricter form. Its much-touted influence on the German fugue is chimerical. Schildt’s Herzlich lieb, as previously mentioned, provides a possible clue to Sweelinck’s influence on the chorale fantasia. It contains all the elements on a small scale, including an echo section. Multi-manual organs fairly cry out for these effects, tiring as they can become. Sweelinck’s own carefully-composed Echo Fantasias are not connected to any cantus firmus except for internal themes; most of them use the lower octave for the echo rather than a different manual. The idea itself seems to have filtered up from France and Italy, through the southern Netherlands. It is possibly significant that the fantasia fragment by Jacob Praetorius on Durch Adams Fall, which has all the signs of being a very early work, is entitled “Echo” in its unique source (Lynar B5 – one of a few in the Lynar set which contain a single work). *** There are precious few works by other Netherlanders of the period to have come down to us. There is no telling what Henderik Speuy, city organist of Dordrecht, might have been up to. His 1610 print of decorated Psalms is for small organ or harpsichord. The Psalm melody is in one hand in long notes, with a highly decorated part in the other. This De Psalmen Davids / gestelt op het Tabulatuer van het Orghel ende Clavecymmel / met 2. Parteijen offers a clear picture of one of Sweelinck’s likely ways of actually improvising on tunes. These simple settings for home use match many similar examples of chorale verses from the Hanseatic school. Anthoni van Noordt, who died in 1673, was a member of Amsterdam’s second most prominent musical family. He was probably a pupil of Sweelinck’s son Dirk, and was father or uncle of Sijbrandt (ii), who printed the first keyboard sonata north of the Alps. Antoni’s Tabulatuur-boeck van psalmen en Fantasyen (1659) has conservative Geneva Psalm settings in various formats for the verses, three which indicate solo voices: bicinia melody in the discant, two parts in the manual, and well-developed pedal part the book’s final entry, Psalm 24, verse 2, is a full-fledged chorale fantasia, including passages with double solo. This may represent late feedback from Hamburg. Van Noordt’s Fantasies are simple counterpoint only, rather like more modern fugues, with nothing reminiscent of past glories. His organ at the Nieuwezijds Kapel had a typical pull-down pedal and a trumpet 8’. There are surprising appearances of F-sharps and G-sharps in his pedal parts, but none in the manuals. A poem appeared in a 1659 Amsterdam anthology praising a Rotterdam organist, Johannes Crabbe; it mentions van Noordt as a worthy model, and also says, “How closely you rival Scheidemann!” – thus confirming the Hamburg master’s continued reputation in The Netherlands. The same poet contributed another piece lauding Anthoni’s brother Jacob, who succeeded Dirk Sweelinck as organist of the Oude Kerk. As for Dirk (1591-1652) himself: only some unadventurous variations on Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern in Lynar B2 can be tentatively ascribed to him. The tragic separation of the Netherlands into North and South didn’t mean there was no contact. Sweelinck crossed the lines to Antwerp in 1604 to pick up a Ruckers harpsichord for the city of Amsterdam, the lid of which can still be seen at the Rijksmuseum. His most important connection to the south was with John Bull (1562-1628), in exile from England at Antwerp since 1615. In Bull’s organ works there are a couple of obvious solos, notably in a Salve Regina. The style was taken up by Pieter Cornet (ca. 1575?-1633) of the Brussels chapel, who has a few possible solo passages in his setting of that hymn and elsewhere. Peter Philips, another English exile at Brussels who was in contact with Sweelinck, has nothing of the sort in his two manualiter Latin hymn settings. But John Koster reminded me that his splendid 1592 Passamezzo Pavane is full of echoes. So the question of intra-Netherlandish exchange with regard to proto-chorale fantasias remains moot. *** After this excursion, let us return to Weckmann and Hamburg. Matthias, who succeeded Ulrich Cernitz at storied St. Jacob’s in 1655, has left us a number of settings which correspond more or less to the standard chorale fantasia. But one in particular is extraordinary. It shares so many characteristics with the seven verses on Vater Unser im Himmelreich by his teacher Jacob Praetorius that I think Weckmann took that for his inspiration, and then surpassed it by orders of magnitude. Es ist das Heil uns kommen her (text by Paul Speratus) was first published with a melody corresponding to an old Catholic processional tune in 1523. It inspired composers as late as Max Reger and Brahms. The first verse of Weckmann’s setting is in motet style, with the chorale in the pedal and a single countersubject derived from the tail of the first (repeated) line. He will come back to this in a big way later. Verses 2-5 are a series of increasingly difficult canons. Verse 6 is an astonishing tour de force of counterpoint. At 258 semibreves, it is not only one of the longest, but certainly the most ingenious of all chorale fantasias. To analyze it here in any degree of detail worthy of the subject would be exhausting for the reader, and ultimately not terribly useful. Anyone interested in unravelling such puzzles is kindly advised to go to the work itself. They will be amply rewarded – assuming they are sufficiently diligent and skilled. Verse 7 Im vollen Werk is relatively short; it has the chorale once through in semibreves in the Tenor. I think that is significant; the word derives from the Latin for “to hold”, and that location is the ancient one for a cantus firmus. The first countersubject returns to the descending tail of line one, also found prominently in Verse 6: salvation, in the form of Christ, descends from heaven. But from line 5 of the chorale it is attached to its reverse, creating a circulatio, of increasing lengths up to a tenth. If I were to hazard a guess as to the locus or topicus being expounded here, I would say the figure welcomes or encircles mankind with divine salvation to an ever-increasing degree, like Bernini’s colonnade at St. Peter’s. Weckmann’s masterpiece is ultimately stuck in contrapuntal gymnastics, which make listening to the piece, weak in rhetoric and flow as it is, a mere mass of sound. It doesn’t really cohere, but moves from one ingenious moment to the next. Some of those moments are very beautiful indeed, but the meaning of most cannot be readily comprehended even by an informed listener. An orchestration by Stokowski might have made it more accessible. Weckmann did not lack industry, and he did not lack technical knowledge; what he lacked was what Haydn simply referred to as “taste” when describing Mozart to his father Leopold. This is a notoriously hard quality to pin down, but when one listens to Weckmann’s vocal works, the lack is rather painfully apparent. Max Seiffert went so far as to cut many repetitious passages in his editions. He must have feared boring his audience, instead of introducing them to the pleasures of 17th-century music. At a Weckmann symposium in the 1990s, a distinguished scholar wondered why Weckmann was not as popular as Henry Purcell. It’s because Purcell was a creative genius, and Weckmann was only a brilliant mechanic. Weckmann’s monumental set of verses is more of a work meant for study than performance for an audience. In that way it resembles Die Kunst der Fuge, which was described as being “practical”, or like the “Goldberg Variations”, which were never meant to be performed as a cycle. It must also be faulted in that, except in Verse 7, there is little evident connection between the text and Weckmann’s elaboration. The essence of an organ chorale was always supposed to be a reflection of the text. Contrast this with a late masterpiece in the old form, one where important elements are more in balance. It comes from the pen of Nicolaus Bruhns (1665-1697), who spent his tragically brief career (he lived four years fewer than Mozart) in Husum, a small town in Schleswig-Holstein. Bruhns was one of the earliest influences on Bach, despite his obscurity. His chorale fantasia on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland begins with serious development of the first line together a single countersubject. Both are progressively ornamented in the solo register. There are clear rhetorical connections to the last three of the four lines of Luther’s chorale text, a paraphrase of St. Ambrose. To indulge again in the parlor game of identifying each locus topicus: the text of the second line is Als der Jungfrau Kind erkannt – “recognized as the virgin’s child”. Bruhns illustrates it by sporting with three countersubjects in invertible counterpoint (a preoccupation of Sweelinck and the North German organ school), against a snippet of the chorale. Then childish echoes appear, too early in the piece – an example of how meaning is created by changing the rules. Taken together, I think this illustrates the true nature of the Child in question. Line three is Dass sich wundre alle Welt – “so that the whole world wonders…”. The setting is a wonder, in triple time, of fragments of chorale tossed around with a countersubject, in an atmosphere of increasing intensity which is crowned by a descending chromatic run down two octaves. The melody of the final line duplicates the first. Bach may have been intrigued by the resemblance of the first four notes to his musical symbol, B flat-A-C-B natural (H in German). The text reads Solch Geburt ihm Gott bestellt – “…that God gave him such a birth”. The chorale is emphatically presented, against spectacular countersubjects showing elements of the majestic French overture. The coda is a triple (Trinitarian) descent – catabasis is the name of the Figur – in two-bar units from heaven to Earth. The “savior of the heathen” of the title has arrived, amidst false A-flats. *** Problems of attribution plague this period, and have led some scholars into temptation. It is dangerously exciting to find anonymous or “misattributed”works that resemble those of a favored composer. But the way (often anonymous) chorale fantasias are scattered across the major sources, as well as those of forgotten Kleinmeister, shows how difficult it is to say anything definitive about its development over wider areas and longer spans of time. By the time of Bruhns’ late masterpiece in the form, the center of gravity had already shifted south, to an obscure region called Thuringia where a family by the name of Bach held musical offices in small towns like Erfurt, Eisenach and Arnstadt. The greatest of its scions would emerge into Saxony in 1708 – to Weimar, then to Cöthen and Leipzig. One of the minor masters who have been passed over here was Jacob Kortkamp (ca. 1615-65) from Kiel, who probably studied with Jacob Praetorius. His chorale fantasia (Verse 3 of his setting of the German Te Deum), not of the first rank, is remarkable only for some prominent D-sharps. Kortkamp’s son Johann (1643-1721) was a student of Weckmann. He could have been present in 1720 when Bach improvised for nearly an hour on An Wasserflüssen Babylon, thus closing the circle on the great Hamburg school of organists. Kortkamp has left us one of most vivid and moving documents in the history of early keyboard music. His “Organists Chronicle” covers the period between the mid-16th century and the departure from Hamburg of city Cantor Christoph Bernhard in 1674, after the death of Weckmann, who suffered either a stroke or a nervous breakdown in 1670 which prevented him from further work. Bernhard, another disciple of Schütz, gave a farewell speech to Weckmann’s Collegium Musicum which was prophetic for Hamburg, as well as regarding a future far beyond anything he could have imagined: “I shall remain with you no longer, my Lords and dear friends; I thank you for the love and respect which you have granted me during the time I was your director. It has been a happy one until now; but there will soon be a great change – music will collapse again, just as she has risen in the past 14 years. In future, no one will trouble to value or seek out upright and worthy men; the favor of the public will be esteemed more than a man’s skill.” Kortkamp tells us, “I will never forget how shocked those of us in the ensemble were by these words, especially myself, who had played the organ 10 years for Bernhard. He taught me many things and treated me like his own child.” He continues: “To me in private he said, ‘Mr. Kortkamp, remember me when you see how the harmony of music declines here due to the loss of men capable of maintaining it. It will be the same with the government of the good city of Hamburg. I see it in the behavior of the younger generation who are trying to gain positions. The collapse will occur within 20 years.’ What have we not experienced since then, up to the year 1700, and the harmony between the classes is still not well and purely tuned.” It was a time of political tumult in Hamburg, and then the era of the Hamburg opera and Johann Mattheson arrived. What a fall was there, as predicted by Christoph Bernhard, from the pinnacles of Praetorius and Scheidemann! 10 May 2026 - back -