By the time you read this, the sun has probably already risen. This morning it beeped above the horizon at five minutes past eight. Not a time to get up and running, especially on a Saturday. But you the first cup of coffee of the name, there was already a lot to do in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam at that time. Because this October 16 is the day that Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck died in Amsterdam in 1621. That is exactly four hundred years ago today.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, I hear you think. Who is that man again? Well, he is considered the most famous composer that the Netherlands has ever produced, and is even seen as a precursor to Bach. Mainly because of his organ skills and knowledge. He was the regular organist of the Oude Kerk for a long time. He was once buried there, although the grave was already cleared in the 17th century. So this morning the meeting took place even after eight o’clock on the site of that missing final resting place in the ambulatory. Roses were laid, there was a music eulogy, and of course there was music. Organ music, but also vocal, such as epitaph, a piece that Daan Manneke composed in 2009 on the epitaph that Joost van den Vondel wrote after Sweelinck’s death.

Joost van den Vondel? Yes, Joost van den Vondel. And Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft did not lie in those sad days three hundred years ago, just like Christiaan Huygens. Vondel, Hooft and Huygens, names that ring bells. The fact that these celebrities took up their pen to commemorate the composer – whose name rings much less now – says something about Sweelinck’s status back then. His name appears in the cartouche above Mahler’s in the Concertgebouw, exactly in the middle. There he is flanked by two other famous Low Landers: Orlando di Lasso and Jacob Obrecht. His music is often played there.

mnemonic

Over the centuries, the ‘Orpheus of Amsterdam’ was loved, and still is, but especially by connoisseurs. The general public knows little about his music. There used to be a mnemonic for Sweelinck and Alphons Diepenbrock, that other ‘most famous’ composer in the Netherlands. The years of one were 1562-1621, those of the other 1862-1921. There were exactly three centuries between one most famous Dutch composer and another. Easy to think, though it also makes you think, that enormous hole of suffering of three hundred years. That bridge has collapsed since Sweelinck researchers discovered that Jan, Pieter’s son, was born in Deventer in 1561.

One of those researchers is Pieter Dirksen, harpsichordist, organist and musicologist. He obtained his doctorate with a thesis on Sweelinck’s keyboard music. An enjoyable readable biography. A collection of texts about Sweelinck’s music, preceded by two new chapters about his life. Not that much is known about it, although Dirksen does come up with an invisible ‘discovery’. There is a famous painted portrait of Sweelinck, made in 1606.

It was always assumed that it was the work of Sweelinck’s equally famous brother Gerrit Pieterszoon. There were already doubts about this, and now Dirksen, with reasonable ‘evidence’, puts forward the hypothesis that it was a young Frans Hals. It is almost symptomatic that in a book about Sweelinck, about whom we know so little, there is nothing new about him, but about Frans Hals. Nothing has been heard from Hals experts.