Membra Jesu Nostri (The Limbs of our Lord Jesus) is the single largest and most compelling of the 110 or so sacred vocal works left us by Dutch-German master
Dietrich Buxtehude.
Buxtehude is better known for his organ music and is rightfully acknowledged as a formative influence on
Johann Sebastian Bach. However,
Buxtehude's vocal output is slightly larger than that for organ, and he was a key player in the refinement of the German sacred concerto into what we now call the sacred cantata, which he and his wife inherited from its creator and his predecessor,
Franz Tunder, in the town of Lübeck. In the years following
Buxtehude's death in 1707, German composers of all kinds were gainfully employed writing cantatas in the thousands,
Georg Philipp Telemann produced nearly 2,000 of them on his own. All of
Bach's cantatas have been recorded, multiple times, but those of
Buxtehude have hardly been approached by scholars, performers, publishers, and recording companies alike.