Buxtehude’s large corpus of brilliant organ music has overshadowed his equally impressive vocal and chamber music. Although his harpsichord works are less numerous and deceptively simple, they show Buxtehude to have been one of the finest German composers for the instrument of the seventeenth century. As did Bach half a century later, Buxtehude took the forms he saw around him – French suites, Italian toccatas and canzonas, variation techniques from the German Sweelinck-school and later on from Rome – and made them unmistakably his own. La Capricciosa, a catalogue of variation techniques on a monumental scale (including a parody of a bad harpsichordist), is Buxtehude’s Goldberg Variations.