Six Preludes from the Brașov Tablature | 17th-Century Transylvanian Organ Music

The Brașov Tablature | Six Preludes from Seventeenth-Century Transylvania

In 1681, Daniel Croner (1656–1740), a Transylvanian musician studying in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), began compiling a remarkable collection of keyboard music. Known today as the "Brașov Tablature," this manuscript preserves a fascinating cross-section of the repertoire circulating through Central Europe during the late seventeenth century.

These six preludes are miniature musical portraits of that world. Brief, economical, and wonderfully varied, they offer a different perspective from the monumental works of the great North German organ tradition. Here, musical ideas are expressed with remarkable concision: a few gestures, a contrapuntal exchange, a cadence, and the piece is complete.

The manuscript is also a testament to musical transmission. Croner preserved music from a variety of sources, some may be his, but we cannot know.

I perform these six preludes on a virtual reconstruction of a historical organ by Johannes Hahn, an eighteenth-century builder active in Transylvania. Although the instrument postdates Croner's manuscript, it offers an evocative historical voice for this repertoire.

Part of The Transylvanian Organ Library, this recording is one piece of a multi-part exploration of the music preserved in the Brașov Tablature.

"The Six Preludes"

0:00 — Prelude in G [No. 21]
0:58 — Prelude in D [No. 17]
1:46 — Prelude in A [No. 20]
2:55 — Prelude in G [No. 22]
3:44 — Prelude in C [No. 16]
4:42 — Prelude in F [No. 23]

Performance: The Singing Organist
Instrument: Johannes Hahn organ, St. Michael's Church, Cluj-Napoca (Hauptwerk). Sampled by Inspired Acoustics.