Dietrich Buxtehude

One of Buxtehude's most interesting chorale preludes. The chorale melody appears ornamented in the soprano range. The chorale deals with Luther's doctrine of the fall and salvation of mankind. The text of the first verse reads as follows: "Through Adam's fall the nature and existence of man has become entirely corrupt, We have inherited that same poison so that we cannot recover without God's comfort, which has redeemed us from the great wrong, into which the serpent forced Eve to take upon herself God's wrath."

Other verses deal with how mankind is redeemed from the fall.

Buxtehude makes numerous references to the text of the chorale in the free contrapuntal voices of the chorale prelude. During the first line of the chorale the bass line moves almost entirely by downward leap, depicting a fall. At the third line of the chorale, in which the text refers to the poison that came upon mankind through the fall, Buxtehude sends a descending chromatic line contrapuntally through all of the voices besides the cantus firmus. The descending chromatic line typically represented death in Baroque music, and Buxtehude may have been alluding to the doctrine that the result of the fall was that death came upon mankind.