Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier – BWV 731 [video]
Just before seeing this on HN I was listening to Buxtehude&#x27;s organ works on my way home. Buxtehude was one of the main inspirations for Bach as a composer¹, and I always find it interesting to go back and forth. But there&#x27;s a reason Bach is the one that has come to be a superstar - there&#x27;s the huge number of surviving works, of course, and in many ways how &quot;the student surpassed the master&quot;, not least in contrapunctal complexity and fugal techniques, but also in the incredible fluidity he could achieve with a seemingly arbitrary number of voices.<p>Still one can listen to Buxtehude and get taken in the beauty and playfulness of his works, and we instantly imagine how young Bach was equally mesmerized by the same music, and in a way, how it kindled a passion and Bach continued to dig into the same musical goldmine that Buxtehude had been excavating - sometimes even the same tunnels, to my ears.<p>Some of my faves in the Buxtehude collection, mostly dramatic stuff (no links because I&#x27;m on crappy 3G):<p><pre><code>    Toccata In D Minor (Bux 155)
    Toccata in G Major (Manualiter) (Bux 164)
    Passacaglia in D minor (Bux 161)
    Prelude in G minor (Bux 149)
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[1]: I won&#x27;t say &quot;the main inspiration&quot; because this is going a bit far into opinion-land, and it doesn&#x27;t even make sense to single out a single composer as &quot;main influence&quot;, but either way, Buxtehude is definitely up there with Bach&#x27;s mentor Georg Böhm.