Symphoniæ Sacræ

PROGRAM NOTES

Heinrich Schütz, the most important German composer of the 17th century, rose to great fame during his lifetime, creating a legacy which was carried on by his many illustrious students.

Schütz's parents were well-respected townspeople, who owned an inn in Weißenfels, where, as luck would have it, the musically inclined Landgrave Moritz of Hessen once spent the night. It's fair to say that without the intervention of Landgrave Moritz, music history might never have known of Heinrich Schütz. Having heard the young Heinrich sing, Moritz invited the boy to study at the Collegium Mauretanium, a school founded by Moritz for the children of local nobility to gain all the skills expected of noblemen of the time. Music being of particular interest to the Landgrave (who was also a performer and composer himself), he included the opportunity for a certain number of choirboys of lesser birth to study alongside the nobility. After some hesitation, and after some further prodding by the Landgrave after he had returned to his residence, young Heinrich's parents allowed him to leave for study in Kassel.

Once Schütz's voice broke, and he no longer had a place as a choir boy, he continued his studies at the university in Marburg, aiming (in keeping with the wishes of his parents) for a degree which would allow him to pursue a more respectable career than that of a musican. However, Moritz again intervened, sought him out in Marburg, and offered to sponsor a trip to Venice for Schütz to study with the venerable (and aging) composer Giovanni Gabrieli. This was an offer Schütz could not refuse, and once in Venice he immersed himself fully in music studies, getting a solid foundation in what we today would call Renaissance polyphonic counterpoint. After Gabrieli's death, Schütz returned to Germany to work as an organist and composer at the Landgrave's court, but in the end, Moritz was unable to keep him. The much more powerful Elector of Saxony (in Dresden) also had become aware of Schütz's skills as a composer and asked to "borrow" Schütz at first for a few months, then a few years, and eventually for the remainder of his career. In Dresden, Schütz found himself in charge of the most prominent musical establishment of protestant Germany, where his large-scale multi-choir compositions graced courtly celebrations until the economic pressures of the Thirty Years' War forced changes in every facet of German society.

In 1628, frustrated by the wartime circumstances in Dresden (paying musicians was not on the top of the to-do list at court), and intrigued by the recent developments in Italian music, Schütz ventured to visit Venice a second time. Here he met Monteverdi, and learned to compose in the modern Italian style with a virtuosic display of solo voices or smaller ensembles, often mixing voices and instruments, and using the basso continuo (a supporting continuous bass line, played most often on a keyboard or other chordal instrument, where the performer improvises upper voices in addition to the written bass notes). While still in Venice, Schütz published his first collection of Symphoniæ Sacræ, small-scale works in this new, Monteverdian style.

Upon Schütz's return to Dresden in 1629, where the war was still draining resources, large celebrations calling for monumental musical works were not possible. Turning to the market for smaller-scale, and thus less expensive, sacred works in the German language, Schütz very successfully adapted this modern Italian trend for his native country, eventually publishing four more collections of sacred concertos, the latter two titled Kleine geistliche Konzerte: small sacred concertos.

Our program includes some beautiful examples of the 17th-century German sacred concerto, by Schütz himself, and by two of his students, Matthias Weckmann and Christoph Bernhard. The term "concerto" (from Italian "concertare," to join together) at this time most often referred to a composition that united both instruments and voices (or, as with the compositions on this program, a solo voice). In the German repertoire, the low voice would often take on either the voice of authority (such as God/Jesus), or, as in the pieces on our program, the voice of the human soul pleading with said authority.

Musically speaking, in works involving multiple voices, the bass singer would often simply double the organ bass line (or, perhaps more accurately, the organ part would simply double the lowest voice in the polyphonic texture). Even in some works for solo bass voice, like the Schütz Ich liege und schlafe, the vocal line is still largely an ornamented version of the organ part. The later O welch eine Tiefe des Reichtums, by Bernhard, has a very florid and virtuosic independent solo part for the singer, but even here the voice and bass instruments still occasionally join together as one.

Weckmann and Bernhard both served under, and learned from, Heinrich Schütz in Dresden, and they both subsequently took posts in Hamburg, another fertile musical environment in 17th-century Germany. Unlike Dresden, Hamburg was a Hanseatic city-state run by the merchant class, with no grand noble court, so the musical life was centered around the city's four main churches, and (after 1678) the public opera house. Weckmann, who came to Dresden as a choir boy to be taught by Schütz, continued as an organist after his voice changed, and Schütz himself brought him to Hamburg to further his studies with Jacob Praetorius and Heinrich Scheidemann, both noted organists. A few years later, Weckmann won a position at the Jacobikirche in Hamburg, and he went on to contribute greatly to the musical life of the city, founding a collegium musicum giving weekly concerts involving the city's leading musicians.

In 1663, tragedy struck the city of Hamburg when an outbreak of the plague wiped out a large part of the population. The vicitims included Scheidemann, and Thomas Selle, leaving the prominent post of civic director of church music in Hamburg vacant. Weckmann suggested his friend Bernhard for the post, where he would be in charge of music in Hamburg's four main churches. Bernhard won the competition for the post by one vote, and remained in Hamburg for ten years, before returning to Dresden, where he held the post of Kapellmeister for the remainder of his life. Bernhard published only one collection of works, containing 20 sacred concertos in a style derived from Schütz's Symphoniæ Sacræ.

In Johann Staden we find one of the earliest German adopters of the Italian practice of basso continuo. Other than this break from tradition, Staden remains stylistically within the German realm. A very well-respected organist and composer in Nuremberg, Staden was given the rare honor of having a collection of instrumental music published posthumously, providing us with the short sonata on our program.

Prothimia Suavissima is the title of a 1672 publication of 24 instrumental sonatas. This publication is unusual in that it does not specify who any of the composers are, but a number of the sonatas are also published elsewhere, with attribution, including works of the composers Antonio Bertali, Heinrich Schmelzer, David Pohle, and Samuel Capricornus, all active in the Germanic lands. Unfortunately the sonata on our program is not known from any other source, so the suggested attribution to Bertali is uncertain.