Georg Friedrich Kauffmann, Fuga "Vater unser im Himmelreich".

This is my entry for the secrets of organ playing contest, week 37. Normaly I choose a piece and then work out a suitable registration fot it. This time, however, I worked the other way around. After yesterday's recording session for my entry in the Sonic Groove Live contest (https://steempeak.com/sgl/@partitura/sonic-groove-live-week-2-johann-ludwig-krebs-prelude-f-minor-kwv-407-original), I decided to keep the registration I used for Kreb's prelude and pick another piece that could be played with it for the Secrest of Organ Playing contest. And so I chose this fugue by Kauffmann.

Georg Friedrich Kauffmann (1679 – 1735), a German composer and organist, is the autor of the “Harmonische Seelenlust”. This work, containing all of his known chorale preludes together with figured bass settings for all but one of the used chorale melodies, was first initiated by Kauffmann as a serial publication. The first volume appeared in 1733. Kauffmann died of tuberculosis in 1735 before he could finish the work. His widow, however, saw it through, and the series was completed in 1740. That his widow completed the publication is probably the reason some of the works included are in fact not composed by Kauffmann. Three of the works were composed by Johann Gottfried Walther and one by Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow.

Today the “Harmonische Seelenlust” is a rich source of inspiration. Not only does it include every form of choral prelude writing developed in the central German Baroque area, it also has very specific registration indications for roughly half of the pieces included in the collection. Even though Kauffmann writes in his prefaces that “hat es doch die Meinung nicht dass es absolut so sein müsste” (it does not mean the indications should be absolutely followed) they nevertheless provide an intruiging insight in the way Kauffmann heard these pieces himself. At the very least it shows us the colourful way in which Kauffmann registered his own work. This makes it the most extensive source of Baroque registration examples available to us today.

The chorale preludes in the Harmonische Seelenlust represent the typical seventeenth- and eighteenth-century style of Central Germany where the text of the particular chorale is ideally set to music for an instrument such as the organ. It essentially entails 96 preludes based on 63 well-known German chorales. Kauffmann outlines these works as ‘short, but elaborated with particular invention and pleasing style’.

The quality of Kauffmann's writing is a bit uneven, but always high. And at his best his writing rivals Bach's work in the same genre. Kauffmann wrote three choral preludes to “Vater unser im Himmelreich”. The first of these is the piece I play today. It is a powerfull 4-voice fugue on the first phrase of the chorale melody. Kauffmann shows he knew his counterpoint. The theme enters 12 times, 3 three times in each of the four voices. The score in the highlights each of them,

See my website for a publication (in three parts) of the complete "Harmonische Seelenlust": http://partitura.org/index.php/kaufmann-georg-friedrich/