Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) was the son of a Danish church organist and followed in his father’s footsteps, most notably at Marienkirche in Lübeck where he worked from 1668 until his death four decades later. His stature in the free imperial city gave him great autonomy as a composer, and his contributions to sacred choral music and the keyboard repertoire made him the most notable figure in Northern European music in the later part of the 17th century.

Buxtehude’s reputation attracted many followers, including the 19-year-old George Frederic Handel who visited Lübeck in 1704. In search of a successor, Buxtehude offered his job to Handel with the conditional expectation that Handel marry his daughter. The libertine and cosmopolitan Handel had no interest in settling down and politely declined the offer. Instead, Handel spent several years in Italy soaking up operatic trends before permanently relocating to England in 1712 finding career stability after his onetime employer Prince George, the Elector of Hanover, was elevated to the English throne. At the heart of Handel’s success in appealing to English audiences was combining continental musical fashion with the English love of dramatic theater and choral music in his innovative and prolific approach to the opera and oratorio genres, alongside numerous orchestral, chamber, and keyboard works.

Johann Sebastian Bach, who, like Handel, was born in 1685, was unhappy with the quality of musicians in the central German town of Arnstadt where he held one of his first jobs as a church organist. The tension with his employer only worsened when he took leave, walking 280 miles to Lübeck to study with Buxtehude for four months in 1705. It is unknown if Buxtehude offered him the job like he did Handel, but unlike Handel, Bach’s career more closely mirrored Buxtehude’s. Bach would leave Arnsdtadt soon after this episode, finding positions in Weimar and Köthen, and eventually achieving his final post in Leipzig where he worked from 1723 until his death in 1750. Much like Buxtehude, he became the city’s most dominant musical force, directing the Thomas School and producing music for the four churches, including 300 cantatas that contributed to six years of annual church cycles. At the time, he was celebrated as a virtuosic keeper of the improvisatory organ-playing tradition, and his sacred, instrumental, and keyboard works continue to represent the height of Baroque composition.

As church services of the 17th century began to incorporate instruments other than organ, the sonata da chiesa (“church music”) took shape as a stand-alone genre of multi-movement instrumental music, developing through the century into the “Trio Sonata.” Its association with sacred music faded and this important early chamber music genre developed a standard fast-slow-fast movement pattern innovated most significantly by Arcangelo Correlli through the 1680s. The instrumentation was flexible but typically featured one or two instruments accompanied by continuo, and served as a model for future generations’ development of various chamber and orchestral genres.

Buxtehude’s contribution to the genre includes the Opus 1 and 2 collection of Trio Sonatas, each with seven sonatas scored for violin, viola da gamba, and basso continuo. These were the only works published during his life in 1694 and 1696 respectively, with some ten others going unpublished like the BuxWV 266 C major Sonata, which included a second violin.

Buxtehude did not feel constrained by any standard movement format in his sonatas, and the Sonata in C was composed in one continuous movement with ten distinct tempo indications. The compact work explores wide-ranging textures and moods, opening and closing with moody slow sections, with a variety of rhythmic and imitative sections throughout.

The seventeenth century saw a greater use of instruments with voices and the development of genres such as the opera, oratorio, and cantata. The cantata was a multi-movement work for choir and instruments that could be either sacred or secular and provided Protestant composers with a model for service music distinctive from the Latin mass. Sacred texts were set for a church’s liturgical needs, and Buxtehude contributed 120 such works to the canon.

Cantatas are typically referred to by the first line of the work, as with Befiehl dem Engel dass er komm' (“Command the Angels, that they come”). Scored for SATB voices, strings, and continuo, the cantata relies on instruments akin to chamber music, independent of the voices. The work’s pensive mood elevates in the final Amen, with a quickened tempo spiced by hemiola rhythms.

Handel’s contribution to the Trio Sonata genre can mostly be found in the Opus 2 collection of six sonatas published in 1733, and the Opus 6 collection of seven sonatas, published in 1739. Most of the Opus 2 collection was composed between 1717 and 1719 and built in the flexibility to present each with two violins, flutes, or oboes.

Number 3 of the Opus 2 collection follows the fast-slow-fast movement pattern with the addition of an introductory Andante. The work has a pastoral quality established in the gentle introduction. The lively fugue in the second movement is contrasted by the swaying Larghetto. The final Allegro is often conversational and harnesses an energetic drive to the work’s conclusion. 

Handel was determined to develop as an opera composer when he was lured to Italy in 1707 by the Medicis with the hope of establishing Florence as an operatic powerhouse, but Pope Clement XI’s detestation of the genre caused trouble for productions. Handel moved to Rome where he earned money composing sacred music for the Church, including cantatas and oratorios. His Gloria was presumed lost until its 2001 discovery and is likely to come from this period. His six-movement cantata setting of the Gloria portion of the Mass is scored for coloratura voice, strings, and continuo.

His interest in opera shines through in the Gloria, which nearly masks as a sacred work for its text, constructed as a series of virtuosic arias only possible for the kinds of skilled singers he worked with in Italy. The work is both youthful in its levity, and mature in its exploration of moods, with orchestration that skillfully allows the singer to project unencumbered by overwrought accompaniment. The opening Gloria sets the light tone with a playful balance between the soloist and ensemble. The movements that follow range from delicate, jubilant, and even grim, before the final ecstatic Amen drives the soloist to virtuosic heights.

The history of the trio sonata comes full circle with Bach’s six organ sonatas, BWV 525-530, in which the form invented for chamber musicians makes its way back to the keyboard. Many of these sonatas are transcriptions of earlier works—some lost as with BWV 526—in which the two solo voices are presented by the keyboard with the pedals executing the continuo. The translation of trio sonata form to the keyboard demonstrates technical mastery of the organ, and the works are masterpieces of the instrument’s literature, compiled by Bach in Leipzig in the late 1720s.

The C minor sonata develops drama through technical density, as with the opening Vivace’s soloistic imitative counterpoint and winding chromaticism. The Largo’s subtle triple-meter is propelled by babbling rhythmic activity, and the final Allegro’s drama unfolds as a fugue with complex layers of thematic materials.

Bach’s earliest-known cantata dates to 1707, but his production exploded when he began work in Leipzig in 1723 where he was responsible for weekly service music, producing three annual liturgical cycles. He also composed at least 50 secular cantatas for concerts and ceremonies, but only half of these survive. 

While the exact date of BWV 196 is unknown, it likely predates his time in Leipzig. His early cantatas tended to be for special occasions—a wedding in this case—and its omission of recitative harkens to seventeenth-century models.

Der Herr denkt an uns (“The Lord is mindful of us”) uses text from Psalm 115 set across five movements, beginning with an orchestral introduction. Bach’s technical writing often shows little distinction between chamber, solo, and choral music, and here the voices match the instrumental writing in complexity, contributing to the imitative textures, and relying on homophonic textures only in key moments, as with the final Amen.