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Updated: June 6, 2025
The first snub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the post of organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married years before the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and had left behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance upon his successor. Händel could have got the job, if he would have had the girl.
He sprang to his feet. "We will go to the festival, the great Bach festival. You, my little son, shall play like a true Bach." As they walked along the road he hummed contentedly to himself, speaking now and then a word to the boy. "What makes one Bach great, makes all. Remember, my child, Reinken is great but he is only one; and Bohm and Buxtehude, Pachelbel. But we are many all Bachs all great."
Of course there were many disputes between the new organist and the elders of the church, but they overlooked his vagaries because of his genius. Yet he must have been a trial to that well-ordered body. Once he asked for a month's leave of absence to visit Lübeck, where the celebrated Buxtehude was playing the organ in the Marien Kirche during Advent.
Had the allied army, after the battle of Hastenbeck, marched directly to the Leine, as it might easily have done, and then taken post on the other side of Wolfenbuttel, Halberstadt, and Magdeburgh, it might have waited securely under the cannon of the latter place for the junction of the Prussian forces; instead of which, they injudiciously turned off to the Lower Weser, retiring successively from Hamelen to Nienburgh, Verden, Rothenburgh, Buxtehude, and lastly to Stade, where, for want of subsistence and elbow-room, the troops were all made prisoners of war at large.
Then I was running back toward the engines. I caught up with Wilcox just before he went into his own quarters. "Wilcox!" He swung around casually, saw it was me, and motioned inside. "How about some Bartok, Paul? Or would you rather soothe your nerves with some first-rate Buxtehude organ...." "Damn the music," I told him.
There was Helgoland, the mysterious island; Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the river Elbe; Buxtehude, notoriously known from a very peculiar ferocious breed of dogs; Norse Loch on the coast of Holstein, and numerous other locker, or inlets, hard to find, harder to enter when found and hardest to pronounce.
But at Lubeck the noble-hearted Buxtehude was endeavoring to bring home to the hearts of the people the mission of music. Bach went thither. Fascinated by the grand organ-playing of the Lubeck master, and listening with heart-felt love to those memorable concerts of which we have previously spoken, Bach forgot both time and engagements.
Little Sebastian suffered in silence from this coldness. Fortunately the force of his genius was too great to be crushed. He knew all the simple pieces by heart, which his brother set for his lessons, and he longed for bigger things. There was a book of manuscript music containing pieces by Buxtehude and Frohberger, famous masters of the time, in the possession of Christoph.
The boy extracted them from their resting-place, and we see the young tone-prophet striving to master the art-forms of Reinken, Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Kerl, Froberger, and Pachelbel, endeavoring to wrest from them their style and inmost meaning by the light of the moon's pale rays, which led, alas! in after-years to blindness. What revelations came to the soul of the young musician we know not.
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