An Wasserflüßen Babylon
Seiffert MS, ca 1750
This paraphrase of Psalm 137 (treating the captivity of the nation of Israel in Babylon), with its long-
lined tune typical of the Straßburg style, inspired a number of composers to write particularly noteworthy music that is recounted in the lore of the North German organ school: Weckman improvised wonderfully upon it at his audition at St James’s, Hamburg, in 1655; the longest seventeenth-
century North German chorale fantasia of all, written by Reincken for his own audition to succeed his teacher Scheidemann at St Catherine’s, Hamburg, in 1663, is based on this tune; and Bach improvised upon it for half an hour, in homage to, and in the presence of, the aged Reincken, at his own audition at St James’s, Hamburg, in 1720.
Pachelbel also based one of his most beautiful chorale preludes upon ‘An Wasserflüßen Babylon’. In this piece a lengthy imitative-
contrapuntal section based on the first phrase of the chant precedes the introduction of the melody proper in the highest voice, with the contrapuntal texture continuing beneath it. The limpid beauty of this four-
voice writing; the poignantly high range of the treble entry of the subject in bar 27, after the first full cadence and a two-bar rest of the upper voices; and above all some exquisitely expressive harmonies – among them, B 6/5 (as the V7 of vi) at the end of the first phrase of the
cf [and elsewhere], and B 4/2 at the end of the seventh, with an exquisitely dissonant D-sharp; the dissonances against a short pedal-
point of E at the beginning of the next phrase, and the E+ triad, followed a half-
bar later by a Bø6/5, at the end of it; and the perhaps unexpected D-minor sonority, with suspended second, at ‘Schmach’ (‘disgrace’) near the end of the penultimate phrase – with, throughout, an alternation between diatonic notes and their chromatic inflections, lend it a very special quality beautifully befitting the text.
Many of us, in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, may have felt our own sense of alienation from ordinary life, and this text has a particular piquancy for musicians whose creative and professional lives have been suspended: ‘Wir hingen auff mit schwerem muth / die orgeln und die harpffen gut’ (‘We hung up, with a heavy heart, our “organs” [i.e., instruments] and harps’). I feel fortunate indeed to have remained employed in the field to which I am called and for which I have been trained.