Adam Brakel plays Buxtehude Praeludium in D Minor

Many of the organ compositions of Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637–1707) and Nicolaus Bruhns (1665–1697) contain bass accidentals that are not playable on the short-octave manual and pedal basses of the late-seventeenth-century organs of Lübeck. The bass octave of Buxtehude’s organs contained just eight notes—C, D, E, F, G, A, A-sharp, and B—a consequence of meantone tuning. It is impossible to imagine that these wonderful and dramatic compositions were not played in some manner on those organs, but that is the extraordinary claim of at least one modern researcher.¹