Although its English title might lead one to believe otherwise, Dieterich Buxtehude's Praeludium for organ in C major, BuxWV 137—known as the Prelude, Fugue and Chaconne—is really not a very lengthy piece of music. It does indeed have three sections of music, the first of which is a free prelude, the second fugal, and the last built up from a ground bass. But each section is comparatively brief, and there are no breaks between the three (which is why Buxtehude called it simply Praeludium, a word that in his day could encompass works with many sections as well as those with few or one); the final Chaconne is differentiated from the other sections through a tempo change to Presto, as opposed to the undefined but probably moderato tempo of the opening. The Prelude portion of BuxWV 137—which is incidentally a work whose date of composition remains unknown and, given Buxtehude's long period of active composition can only be narrowed to the second half of the seventeenth century—is itself made up of several short, discrete musical sentences. The main idea from the first of them, an oscillating sixteenth note figure, is re-forged first into the subject for the Fugue portion, and then, by way of more sweeping rhythmic changes, into the ground bass for the Chaconne section, which ends in an impressive quasi-cadenza blaze.

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