His father originated from Oldesloe in the Duchy of Holstein, which at that time was a part of the Danish realms in Northern Germany.

The beginning of his career coincided with the First and Second Dano-Swedish Wars that led to the Swedish conquest of eastern Denmark (Scania, Blekinge and Halland).

It is uncertain whether the war influenced Dieterich's work situation, but in 1660, he accepted a position at St. Mary's in Helsingør in Zealand.

[6] Buxtehude's last post, from 1668, was at the Marienkirche, Lübeck which had two organs, a large one for big services and a small one for devotionals and funerals.

[3] His post in the free Imperial city of Lübeck afforded him considerable latitude in his musical career, and his autonomy was a model for the careers of later Baroque masters such as George Frideric Handel, Johann Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach.

In 1673 he reorganized a series of evening musical performances, initiated by Tunder, known as Abendmusik, which attracted musicians from diverse places and remained a feature of the church until 1810.

He offered his position in Lübeck to Handel and Mattheson but stipulated that the organist who ascended to it must marry his eldest daughter, Anna Margareta.

Bach, then a young man of twenty, walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck, a distance of more than 400 kilometres (250 mi), and stayed nearly three months to hear the Abendmusik, meet the pre-eminent Lübeck organist, hear him play, and, as Bach explained, "to comprehend one thing and another about his art".

[9] The bulk of Buxtehude's oeuvre consists of vocal music, which covers a wide variety of styles,[3] and organ works, which concentrate mostly on chorale settings and large-scale sectional forms.

[10] Gustaf Düben's collection and the so-called Lübeck tablature A373 are the two most important sources for Buxtehude's vocal music.

Johann Christoph Bach's manuscript is particularly important, as it includes the three known ostinato works and the famous Prelude and Chaconne in C major, BuxWV 137.

The nineteen organ praeludia (or preludes) form the core of Buxtehude's work and are ultimately considered[by whom?]

They are usually either fugues or pieces written in fugal manner; all make heavy use of pedal and are idiomatic to the organ.

[12] A few pieces are smaller in scope; for example, BuxWV 144, which consists only of a brief improvisatory prelude followed by a longer fugue.

For example, BuxWV 149 begins with a single voice, proceeds to parallel counterpoint for nine bars and then segues into the kind of texture described above.

to various forms of non-motivic interaction between voices (arpeggios, chordal style, figuration over pedal point, etc.).

In terms of structure, Buxtehude's fugues are a series of expositions, with non-thematic material appearing quite rarely, if ever.

[9] Here is an example from chorale Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott BuxWV 184: The ornamented cantus firmus in these pieces represents a significant difference between the north German and the south German schools; Johann Pachelbel and his pupils would almost always leave the chorale melody unornamented.

The chorale fantasias (a modern term) are large-scale virtuosic sectional compositions that cover a whole strophe of the text and are somewhat similar to chorale concertos in their treatment of the text: each verse is developed separately, allowing for technically and emotionally contrasting sections within one composition.

The pieces feature numerous connected sections, with many suspensions, changing meters, and even real modulation (in which the ostinato pattern is transposed into another key).

The praeludium in C major, BuxWV 137, begins with a lengthy pedal solo and concludes not with a postlude of arpeggios and scale runs, but with a comparatively short chaconne built over a three-bar ostinato pattern in the pedal: The praeludium in G minor, BuxWV 148, in which the ostinato pattern is derived from the subject of one of the fugal sections, also ends in a chaconne.

Of the organ works, a few keyboard canzonas are the only strictly contrapuntal pieces in Buxtehude's oeuvre and were probably composed with teaching purposes in mind.

Like Froberger's, all dances except the gigues employ the French lute style brisé, sarabandes and courantes frequently being variations on the allemande.