Featured Composer: Heinrich Schütz
Heinrich Schütz, the most important German composer before J.S. Bach, was born October 8, 1585 in Köstritz, Saxony. His family moved to Weissenfels in 1590, when Heinrich’s father inherited an inn there. The boy showed promise in all his studies. At age thirteen, on the strength of his singing, he joined the court choir of Moritz, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who furthered his education and encouraged his continuing with music as a vocation, going so far in 1609 as to tempt Heinrich away from legal study at the University of Marburg with an offer of a grant for two years of study in Venice under the direction of the aging master Giovanni Gabrieli. The Italian experience was of great importance for the young Schütz, who, before returning, published his first important collection, a book of nineteen five-part madrigals. Italian influence persisted in his later works, although the great majority of them had German texts. In fact, masterful setting of the German language is one of the composer’s signal traits.
Returning in 1613 as an organist at the Kassel court, he soon came to the attention of Johann Georg, the Elector of Saxony, who prized him away from the reluctant Moritz in 1617. Schütz remained in service as Kapellmeister at the Electoral court in Dresden for the rest of his long life. His next publication was Psalmen Davids, a collection of twenty-six sumptuous psalm settings, in German, for two or more choruses of singers with instruments. That same year, 1619, he married Maria Wildeck, eighteen year-old daughter of a court official. They had two daughters, born in 1621 and 1623.
1623 also saw the publication of Historia der Aufferstehung, the first of his biblical narrative pieces, and a setting of Psalm 116, the latter in a collection of works on the same text by sixteen different composers. Canciones sacrae, forty-one motets on Latin devotional texts followed in 1625. Their particularly expressive character reflects the composer’s experience with the Italian madrigal, much as the Psalmen Davids echo the grandeur of works he had encountered in Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice.
1625 brought Schütz the shock of his young wife’s death. Instead of remarrying, which would have been the customary course of action, he placed the girls in the care of their maternal grandmother. Then, for awhile, he turned away from complex works to focus on a large set of simple four-part settings of psalm paraphrases by Cornelius Becker. A collection of 103 of these, the Becker Psalter, was published in 1628, intended for congregational and choir school use. In the previous year, Schütz had provided music for the wedding of one of the elector’s daughters. The principal showpiece was Dafne, a dramatic work that is often called the first German opera. Unfortunately, this music, like virtually all of Schütz’s music for such splendid occasions, has been lost.
Schütz traveled again to Italy again in 1628 to familiarize himself with new Italian styles, particularly that of Monteverdi, and also to conduct business, such as instrument purchase, for the Kapelle. Before returning to Dresden, he exhibited his new learning in a collection of twenty pieces for one to three singers with various small instrumental combinations, Symphoniae sacrae I, published in Venice in 1629.
By this time, the Thirty Years War had begun to erode the funds available for musical establishments in German courts. Musicians in the Dresden Kapelle had ceased to receive regular pay, and in 1628 Schütz petitioned Johann Georg on their behalf. Schütz himself was paid in this period only through advances that he requested for particular purposes. The Saxon situation deteriorated more rapidly after Johann Georg concluded a treaty with Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1631, abandoning the neutrality he had been able to maintain until then. Musical activity at the Dresden court withered and the Kapelle began to shrink. In the 1630’s, Schütz suffered many personal losses, including his friend the composer Johann Hermann Schein, both of his parents, his father-in-law, one of his brothers, and his elder daughter. Count Heinrich Posthumus of Reuss, too, died. For his burial service early in 1636, Schütz was commissioned to set texts the count had specified for the occasion. The result was the Musikalische Exequien., his largest funeral piece, and a deeply felt one.
Two things characterize Schütz’s activity for the fifteen years following 1630: the composition of pieces requiring small performing forces, and opportunities for work away from Dresden, on loan, so to say, to other courts that were in better financial condition and were eager to employ a star. He served as Kapellmeister for the Danish king Christian IV for all of 1634 and again from 1642 to 1644, the latter followed by a year’s stay in Brunswick and Wölfenbuttel. He lived at Hildesheim in 1640 serving as Kapellmeister for Georg of Calenberg. The Copenhagen visits involved weddings for which Schütz managed the extensive musical festivities — opportunities for showy dramatic works — presresumably composing much of the music himself. Unfortunately this music, too, has been lost. The Kleine geistliche Konzerte, two collections published in 1636 and 1639, show his resourcefulness in creating effective pieces — fifty-six of them alll together — using one or a few voices with only continuo accompaniment, works providing service music for the straitened times in which they were composed.
By 1647 conditions had changed sufficiently for Schütz to feel that he could publish a second set of Symphoniae sacrae, twenty-seven pieces that he had written “some years ago.” The following year there followed the Geistliche Chor-Musik, contrasting greatly with the Italianate Symphoniae, being not concerti, but twenty-nine motets composed to encourage composers to develop their skills in traditional counterpoint. In 1650 a third set of twenty-one Symphoniae sacrae appeared, the last collection of new work Schütz himself would publish. However, a collection, Zwolfe geistliche Gesänge, was published in 1657 under the direction of the court organist, presumably from manuscript copies in the library of the Kapelle.
As early as 1645, Schütz, citing his increasing age and diminishing energy, began periodically to petition Johann Georg for permission to retire, to be freed of his routine duties as Kapellmeister, but to retain the title and lead the group on special occasions. The elector consistently ignored these requests, but did allow the chief musician to spend more time away from the court, at his home in Weissenfels. Only when Johann Georg II became elector after his father’s death in 1656 did Schütz’s situation improve substantially.
One of the composer’s stated desires was to be able to finish older uncompleted works. It is unclear that he made much progress toward that goal, but he did continue to compose. His first project after 1657 was a revision and enlargement of the Becker Psalter. This enlargement, ordered by Johann Georg II, achieved publication in 1661. The Historia der Geburth Jesu Christi took shape in the early 1660’s. Its evangelist part, for tenor and continuo, was made available in printed form in 1664. Three Passion settings, following the accounts of evangelists Luke, John, and Matthew were all ready for performances at Dresden in April 1666.
In his eighty-fifth year, Schütz gave up his Weissenfels house and moved to rented quarters in Dresden, where he spent much of his time reading the Bible and theological works. He was not through composing, however. In his last two years he finished an ambitious of set of works for double chorus known collectively by the name Schwanengesang, as the composer apparently called it himself — his swan-song. It comprises the long Psalm 119 divided into eleven motets, a setting of Psalm 100, and a Magnificat. It is hard not to read this assemblage as a personal statement: a psalm in praise of the divine law, a call to public thanksgiving, and finally, a unique canticle of personal thanksgiving and wonder.
After suffering a severe stroke, Heinrich Schütz died on 6 November 1572, four weeks past his 87th birthday. His pre-eminence among German musicians was widely recognized. His funeral plaque calls him “a joy to foreigners, a light to Germans,” and a “Christian Asaph”, a biblical cymbal-clashing singer of joyful songs, an apt reference to the persistent importance of the Psalms in the music of Schütz from 1619 until the end of his life.