Praeludium in E minor (Great)

Nicolaus Bruhns (1665–1697)
Praeludium in E minor (Great)

Prologue: Frescobaldi’s Toccata cromatica per l’Elevatione (from Fiori musicali)
Struggle: Bruhns’ Praeludium in E Minor (Great)

This recording forms the second stage of a musical exploration of grief, struggle, suffering, contemplation of mortality, and finally hope and transcendence across centuries of organ literature. Frescobaldi started this journey with an inward and contemplative rhetoric portraying suffering, prayer, and stillness. He created a space where sound itself seems to breathe. Bruhns’ monumental Praeludium in E minor now represents the point where that inward reflection erupts into confrontation and struggle.

This piece belongs to the great North German Stylus Phantasticus tradition: a dramatic alternation of free toccata writing, fugue, virtuoso passagework, and rhetorical contrasts of texture and character. Yet beneath its virtuosic surface lies a powerful expressive language rooted in the Baroque doctrine of musical affect, which I exploit to express the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. All these can be heard and felt in Bruhn’s masterpiece.

Central to this work and the dark brooding theme we’re concerned with is the descending chromatic tetrachord, a gesture long associated with lament and grief (not just centuries, but millenia, going back to the Greeks even). Listeners encountered this same musical figure in the opening Frescobaldi work, and here Bruhns expands it into the structural DNA of the entire piece.

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