Organ Works

"with appealing registrations, an almost ideal choice of programme, good notes and undistractingly natural recording, Naxos have produced a single-CD anthology of this most companionable of organ composer that merits general recommendation"
- Gramophone

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck spent the greater part of his life and his entire professional career in Amsterdam, a city that had grown in wealth and importance during the later sixteenth century. As an appendage of Burgundy the town had enjoyed a degree of independence, leading, in the later sixteenth century, to a relative lack of political interest in the struggles against Spain. In 1578, however, Amsterdam rejected its Catholic magistracy in favour of the reformed religion and Prince William of Orange, soon to form part of the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces. In spite of the official change of religion, an alteration that might well have affected musical life for the worse, a surprising degree of religious tolerance was preserved. Amsterdam continued with a large Catholic minority, and larger group, to which Sweelinck may himself have belonged, of citizens who kept their old loyalty to Catholicism, while fulfilling whatever duties might fall to them under the new Calvinist régime.

Sweelinck was born in the Hanseatic town of Deventer in 1562, the son of a professional musician who, in the early 1560s, moved to Amsterdam as organist of the Oude Kerk, a position he held, its relatively meagre emoluments perhaps supplemented by other employment, until his death in 1573. It must be supposed that his son had his early musical training from his father and certainly his general education under the guidance of the Catholic Jacob Buyck, priest of the Oude Kerk until the changes of 1578. Later musical study is thought to have been as a pupil of Jan Willemszoon, later surnamed Lossy, in Haarlem. It seems probable that Sweelinck succeeded to his father's position as organist of the Oude Kerk in 1577, since an obituary tribute credits him with 44 years in a position that he certainly held until his death in 1621.