Heinrich Schütz

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(b Bad Löstriz, bap. 9 Oct 1585; d Dresden, 6 Nov 1672). German composer. In 1590 he moved with his family to Weissenfels. In 1598 Landgrave Moritz, impressed by his musical accomplishments, took him to Kassel, where he served as a choirboy and studied music with the court Kapellmeister, Georg Otto. In 1609 Schütz proceeded to the University of Marburg to study law, but Landgrave Moritz advised him to abandon his university studies and to go to Venice as a pupil of G. Gabrieli; moreover, the landgrave provided the financial means to do this. Schütz remained in Venice for over three years, returning to Moritz's court at Kassel in 1613. The following year he was seconded to serve for two months at the electoral court in Dresden, and in 1615 the Elector Johann Georg I requested his services for a further two years. Moritz reluctantly agreed, and was obliged, for political reasons, to comply when the elector insisted on retaining Schütz in his permanent employ.

As Kapellmeister at Dresden, Schütz was responsible for providing music for major court ceremonies, whether religious or political. He also had to keep the Kapelle adequately staffed and supervise the musical education of the choirboys. His pupils during the following decades included the composers Bernhard, Theile and Weckmann. In 1619 Schütz published his first collection of sacred music, the Psalmen Davids, dedicated to the elector, and later that year he married Magdalena Wildeck. She died in 1625, leaving Schütz with two daughters whom he placed in the care of their maternal grandmother; he never remarried.

Schütz was often absent from Dresden on his own or the elector's business, and in 1627 he was at Torgau, where his Dafne (the first German opera) was performed for the wedding of the elector's daughter Sophia Eleonora. Visits to Mühlhausen and possibly Gera were undertaken later in the year. Towards the end of the 1620s economic pressures of the Thirty Years War began to affect the electoral court. Musicians wages fell into arrears, and in 1628 Schütz decided on a second visit to Venice, where he was able to study developments in dramatic music under Monteverdi's guidance. He returned to Dresden in 1629, but two years later Saxony entered the war and musical activities at court soon came to a virtual halt. Schütz then accepted an invitation to direct the music at the wedding of Crown Prince Christian of Denmark. He arrived in Copenhagen in December 1633 and was paid a salary as Kapellmeister by King Christian IV until his return to Dresden in May 1635.

From Michaelmas 1639 Schütz was again absent from Dresden, this time for about 15 months in the service of Georg of Calenberg. On his return he found the Kapelle further depleted and its members living in penury, and for most of 1642-4 he was again employed at the Danish court. After a year in and around Brunswick he went into semi-retirement, spending much of his time in Weissenfels, though he retained the title and responsibilities of Kapellmeister at Dresden. The end of the Thirty Years War had little immediate effect on musical conditions and in 1651 Schütz renewed an earlier plea for release from his duties and the granting of a pension. This and later petitions were ignored and Schütz obtained his release only on the elector's death in 1656. He was far from inactive during his remaining 15 years. He continued to supply music for occasions at Dresden, frequently travelled and worked on the masterpieces of his last years - the Christmas History, the three Passions and the settings of Psalms cxix and c.

Schütz was the greatest German composer of the 17th century and the first of international stature. His output was almost exclusively sacred; he set mainly biblical texts and wrote little chorale-based music. His early works explore a variety of styles and genres: the polychoral Psalmen Davids (1619) are notable for their contrasting textures and sonorities, while the Cantiones sacrae (1625) present a wide range of motet settings, from the polyphonic to the concertato. Later, he exploited the Italian concertato idiom to the full, notably in the three books of Symphoniae sacrae (1629, 1647, 1650), which give equal weight to voices and instruments. His two sets of Kleine geistliche Concerte (1636, 1639), written after the Thirty Years War and for limited forces, emphasize the meaning of the text, combining principles of monody and counterpoint to create powerful and expressive declamation. Schütz's late works are dominated by the oratorical pieces and by the three unaccompanied ‘dramatic’ Passions, said to be the last great examples of the genre. His music, largely to German texts, constitutes the ultimate realization of Luther's endeavours to establish the vernacular as a literary and liturgical language, and embodies the Protestant and humanistic concept of musica poetica in perhaps its most perfect form.

works:
Sacred vocal music

• Psalmen Davids, 26 psalms (1619)
• Resurrection History (1623)
• Cantiones sacrae, 41 motets (1625)
• Becker Psalter (1628, rev. 1661)
• Symphoniae sacrae, i, 20 motets (1629), ii, 27 motets (1647), iii, 21 motets (1650)
• Musicalische Exequien (1636)
• Kleine geistliche Concerte, i, 24 motets (1636), ii, 32 motets (1639)
• Geistliche Chor-Musik (29 motets, 1648)
• 12 geistliche Gesänge (1657)
• Die sieben Worte (? c 1660)
• Christmas History (1664)
• St Matthew, St Luke and St John Passions (1666)

Secular vocal music

• 19 madrigals (1611)
• Dafne, opera (1627), lost
• occasional works

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The German composer Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) is credited with an important role in bringing the Italian baroque style to Germany.

Born in Köstritz, Saxony, to prosperous, middle-class parents, Heinrich Schütz learned the rudiments of music in the chapel choir of Moritz, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. In 1608 Schütz entered the University of Marburg to study law, but when the landgrave, who recognized his extraordinary musical gift, offered to support him, Schütz was able to leave for Venice in 1609 to study with Giovanni Gabrieli. Schütz returned in 1613 after his teacher's death.

While in Italy, Schütz published his first collection, Il primo libro de madrigali (1611), dedicated to Landgrave Moritz. These 19 chromatic madrigals reveal the close attention Schütz was always to give both the syntax and content of his texts. Even more Italianate are the Psalmen Davids (1619), published after the composer became kapellmeister to Johann Georg, Elector of Saxony, in Dresden. In these 26 works, composed for multiple groups of vocal and instrumental soloists, reinforced by two or more choruses, Schütz brought to northern Europe the colorful, polychoral methods of his beloved master, Gabrieli. The music, of overwhelming grandeur, was written for the enhancement of the Protestant liturgy and the edification of the court.

Schütz's Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi (1623), the Easter Story, was his first oratorio in the Italian style. While the Evangelist performs solos to the accompaniment of four viols, the roles of Jesus and Mary Magdalene are sung as duets over the basso continuo. In his next important work, the Cantiones sacrae (1625), Schütz seemed to return to the older polyphonic style. But their chromaticism, "madrigalisms" illustrating the text, and intensely subjective qualities relate these sacred songs more closely to the madrigals of 1611.

To fulfill his task of transforming church music through the southern concerted style, Schütz made a second pilgrimage to Italy in 1628. Now he studied the techniques of Claudio Monteverdi as he observed them in the vocal and instrumental writing of the great Italian. The first fruits of the visit appeared the following year as part 1 of Schütz's Symphoniae sacrae. Solo singing with obbligato instruments over the continuo - such was the new style exemplified by the masterpiece of this first collection, Fili mi, Absalon.

A short while after Schütz returned to Germany, he found musical activity severely curtailed because of the religious wars raging throughout Saxony. During the 1630s and early 1640s he stayed only intermittently at Dresden, obtaining permission from the elector to work in Copenhagen, Wolfenbüttel, Hanover, and Weimar. Because of limited resources, the master now wrote shorter compositions for one to five parts with continuo. Two such collections were issued in 1636 and 1639 with the title Kleine Geistliche Konzerte.

By 1647 conditions at the Saxon court had improved somewhat, and Schütz released part 2 of his Symphoniae sacrae. Unlike part 1, which had Latin settings for voices and various obbligato instruments, part 2 was set to German words and used only the strings and continuo. In part 3 of the Symphoniae sacrae (1650) Schütz joined the polychoral writing of his early Psalmen Davids with the soloistic style he learned from Monteverdi. The masterpiece Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? is scored for a six-voice ensemble, two four-voice choruses, and two obbligato instrumental parts. In few of his later pieces did he go beyond the resources of these compositions, which are truly cantatas.

Although Schütz was the foremost German protagonist of the new baroque style, he did not foresee that his apparent deemphasis of counterpoint would persuade younger compatriots to abandon it. By 1648 this danger had become so manifest that Schütz was persuaded to publish his Geistliche Chormusik, a collection of 29 motets in the older style, to show young composers "before they proceed to concertizing music to crack this hard nut (wherein the true kernel and the right foundation of good counterpoint is to be sought) and to pass their first tests in this category." Schütz obviously viewed his artistic mission as a union of counterpoint and stile recitativo, a cappella and concertato, rather than as a rejection of the older Flemish style.

In 1665 Schütz completed three Passions according to Luke, John, and Matthew. What first impresses us in these works is their external austerity. Gone are the instrumentally accompanied recitative of the Easter Story and the polychoral writing with instruments in part 3 of the Symphoniae sacrae. Here the Bible narrative is sung a cappella with solo portions chanted in a "Germanized" plainsong.

Even though these works seem archaic, it would be incorrect to believe that Schütz rejected his entire mission of a concerted, soloistic church music. Only a year or two before, he had composed the Historia der Freuden-und Gnaden-reichen Geburt Gottes und Marien Sohnes Jesu Christi, the Christmas Story, in the richly concerted style he had espoused for over 50 years. In the Passions he abandoned the luxuriant apparatus for pure chant and polyphony, in part as an object lesson to younger composers and in part to demonstrate that his own era could still use the a cappella style of the past.

Schütz passed the last of his 55 years of service to the elector of Saxony in Weissenfels and in Dresden, where he died. Through his efforts German church music took on features we easily recognize as baroque. In the way he put polyphony on an equal footing with the new concerted style, Schütz resembles Monteverdi, who also brought the past into the present and subjected it to a new esthetic.

Further Reading

Hans J. Moser, Heinrich Schütz: His Life and Work (1936; trans. 1959), is the most complete study of the master. The music of Schütz in relation to his contemporaries is treated in Manfred E. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era: From Monteverdi to Bach (1947), and in Claude V. Palisca, Baroque Music (1968).

Additional Sources

Geier, Martin, Music in the service of the church: the funeral sermon for Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), St. Louis, MO: Concordia Pub. House, 1984.

Horton, John, Schütz: October 1585-6 November 1672, London:Novello, 1986.

Schütz, Heinrich (Köstritz nr. Gera, 1585-1672, Dresden), enjoyed the early patronage of Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, who sent him to study from 1609 to 1613 under Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice. His work for the Dresden court began in 1614, and by 1619 he had become the acknowledged Kapellmeister to the electoral court, a post he held until the succession of Johann Georg II in 1656, after which he held the less onerous post of senior Kapellmeister. In 1628 he gained permission to study in Venice again, this time under Monteverdi. Such was Schütz's renown that he was influential at a number of other courts. From 1633 to 1635, at a time when Saxony's involvement in the Thirty Years War had led to the neglect of the formerly prestigious electoral musical establishment, Schütz worked in Denmark, where he composed the music for the wedding celebrations of Crown Prince Christian to Magdalena Sibylle of Saxony in 1634. His association with the court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, where he advised Duchess Sophie Elisabeth on composition (1644), led to his appointment as absentee Kapellmeister. During the last years of his life Schütz spent much time in Weißenfels, the town of his childhood, but appears to have returned to Dresden in 1670. Schütz was the greatest German composer of the 17th c. and was widely recognized as such. The renewed interest in him dates from the 19th c. (edn. by P. Spitta, 1885-94).

Though primarily a composer of religious and liturgical music, Schütz set a German adaptation (by M. Opitz) of the opera Daphne by O. Rinuccini, which was performed in Torgau in 1627. Like all his music for the stage this score has been lost. Nearly all Schütz's religious works are vocal, the Lutheran Bible being a favoured source for texts. He composed three Passions (St Matthew, St Luke, and St John, all 1665-6), early in life a Resurrection Oratorio (Historia der Aufferstehung, 1623), and in old age a Christmas Oratorio (Historia der freuden- und gnadenreichen Geburth Gottes und Marien Sohnes Jesu Christi, first performed in 1660). He also made settings of the Psalms (Die Psalmen Davids, 1619), and late in life set the very long Psalm 119. He wrote funeral music, Musicalische Exequien, performed in 1636, for his friend Prince Heinrich Posthumus von Reuß, and many motets. His last work was a Deutsches Magnificat (1671).

Schütz, Heinrich (1585–1672), German composer. Heinrich Schütz was the most important German composer of vocal music in the seventeenth century. For much of his long career, Schütz was kapellmeister (music director) to the elector of Saxony at the Dresden court, as well as serving in the court of Christian IV of Denmark. A student of the Venetian masters Giovanni Gabrieli (1557–1612) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), Schütz synthesized Italian and German procedures in an unprecedented manner that was to have a profound influence on the course of German baroque music.

Schütz was born in Kösteritz near Gera (Saxony) and baptized 9 October 1585. At the age of four his musical talent attracted the attention of Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, who persuaded Schütz's parents to send him to his court for further education in music and art. He was an apt pupil who excelled in languages, and also studied law at the University of Marburg. However, with the landgrave's support, he traveled to Venice to study with Giovanni Gabrieli. Here he received training in Renaissance polyphony as well as the polychoral innovations favored at San Marco, and published a set of five-voice madrigals in 1611.

Upon his return to Germany around 1613, Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony requested Schütz's service for the Dresden court. Schütz obtained his release from Moritz after several years of complex negotiations, arriving in Dresden in 1615, becoming the vice-kapellmeister in March 1617 and kapellmeister in 1619, although he only received this title officially in 1621 after the death of Michael Praetorius (1571–1621). The Dresden court maintained a large musical establishment, and Schütz's extensive duties included the training of choirboys, hiring personnel, staffing, and the producing of secular and sacred music for all civic and religious occasions. Music in Dresden flourished prior to that city's belated involvement in the Thirty Years' War, as did Schütz's productivity and fame. His Psalmen Davids sampt etlichen Moteten und Concerten (1618), the first important collection of German church music, reflected the influence of Gabrieli's Symphoniae Sacrae and exploited the lavish vocal and instrumental resources at the Dresden court and the sonic potential of the elector's chapel. The originality of this enterprise is apparent in the detailed instructions included in the preface, which describes the proper size, makeup, and position of the forces, and other aspects of performance practice.

In addition to sacred compositions in a variety of genres, including biblical dramas and Latin motets, Schütz composed what is usually regarded as the first German opera, Apollo und Dafne, which has not survived. A second trip to Italy in 1628—and studies with Claudio Monteverdi—introduced Schütz to the most recent Italian innovations in dramatic music, in particular the techniques for expressive solo singing associated with the seconda prattica (second practice). Schütz's first set of Symphonie Sacrae (1629) integrates this revolutionary new approach to text setting with the impressive use of instrumental colors and vocal sonorities gleaned from Gabrieli.

The last decades of Schütz's career at Dresden were marked by the economic pressures of the Thirty Years' War, which Saxony entered in 1631, and the meager vocal and instrumental forces he used in the compositions from this period, such as the first two sets of Kleine geistliche Konzerte (Little spiritual concertos), dating from 1636 and 1639, reflect the severe economic conditions in Germany. He twice journeyed to Copenhagen to compose music for the court of Christian IV (to whom he would dedicate his second set of Symphoniae Sacrae [1646]) and served several other prominent North German courts. In failing health, Schütz was finally permitted to take partial retirement in 1656, although he continued to advise the court on musical matters as kapellmeister. During the 1660s, he also composed a biblical drama based on the Christmas story (Historia . . . der . . . Geburth . . . Jesu Christi [1664]) of three Passions: St. John, St. Matthew, and St. Luke, all performed in Dresden in April 1666. These intense, personal works are noteworthy because of their stark, highly dramatic quality, the fidelity to the text of the Gospels, and the use of a different mode for each to accentuate the individual nature of the utterances. Schütz died on 5 November 1672, and his funeral was held at Dresden's Frauenkirche on 17 November.

Although little of Schütz's secular music has survived, he left an impressive body of sacred works in numerous genres that range from sober expressions of Lutheran piety to full-bodied, dramatic manifestations of unmatched sonic splendor. The essence of Schütz's style is an extraordinary synthesis of German and Italian techniques—the grand approach of Gabrieli and the expressive text-setting and sense of drama that distinguishes Monteverdi's compositions, combined with the contrapuntal integrity and innate serious tone that was part of Schütz's German training and heritage. It is this genius that would find expression in the high German baroque through the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and George Frideric Handel (1685–1759).

Bibliography

Primary Source

The Letters and Documents of Heinrich Schütz 1656–1672: An Annotated Translation. Edited by Gina Spagnoli. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990. Translations of letters and important documents with extensive commentary about Schütz's career and style.

Secondary Sources

Breig, Werner. "Heinrich Schütz's Musikalische Exequien: Reflections on Its History and Textual-musical Conception." In Church, Stage, and Studio: Music and its Contexts in Seventeenth-Century Germany, edited by Paul Walker, pp. 109–225. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990.

Frandsen, Mary. "Allies in the Cause of Italian Music: Schütz, Prince Johann Georg II and Musical Politics in Dresden." Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125 (2000): 1–40.

Moser, Hans Joachim. Heinrich Schütz: His Life and Works. Translated by Carl F. Pfatteicher. St. Louis, 1959. Translation of Heinrich Schütz: Sein Leben und Werk (1959).

Smallman, Basil. Schütz. Oxford, 2000. Excellent overview of life and musical style, with complete works list and chronology.

—WENDY HELLER, MARK KROLL

• Period: Baroque (1600-1749)
• Country: Germany
• Born: October 08, 1585 in Köstritz, Germany
• Died: November 06, 1672 in Dresden, Germany
• Genres: Choral Music, Miscellaneous Music

Biography

Heinrich Schütz, in a way, stood as a bridge between the Renaissance and Bach. He infused his church music with a greater drama than previously heard in Germany by developing and transforming the Italian choral style he had learned in his studies with Gabrieli. Schütz's Psalmen Davids (1619) shows the influence of Gabrieli but also divulges his own unique voice. His melodic invention is in evidence in the Becker Psalter (1626), while his Geistliche Chor-Music (1648), a collection of motets, represents perhaps the greatest such assemblage from his century. A large number of his compositions went unpublished, most of those now lost.

Schütz was born in Köstritz (now Bad Köstritz) and raised in Weissenfels, where his father operated an inn. Young Heinrich probably studied with George Weber, a composer and the local Kantor. At 13, Schütz entered the Collegium Mauritianum in Kassel at the urging of Landgrave Moritz of Hessen, who had established it four years earlier. Schütz became a choirboy in the Landgrave's court and studied under kapellmeister Georg Otto. Shortly after leaving the Collegium in 1608 (such lengthy study was not unusual), Schütz left for Venice to study with Giovanni Gabrieli.

In 1613, he returned to Germany and accepted a post as second organist in the Landgrave's court. Around this time he met Johann Herman Schein, with whom he would remain close friends until Schein's death in 1631. In 1615, Schütz entered service in the Dresden court of Elector Johann Georg of Saxony and two years later became, in effect, kapellmeister, holding the most powerful musical post in Protestant Germany.

Schütz's first sacred music publication appeared in 1619. Psalmen Davids sampt etlichen Moteten und Concerten comprised 26 works for various choruses and instruments. On June 1, that year, the composer married Magdalene Wildeck, 15 years his junior. Throughout the early 1620s, Schütz remained quite active in composition, perhaps finding his personal happiness a springboard for his creativity. In 1625, however, Magdalene died after a brief illness, dealing Schütz a devastating blow.

This tragedy seems to have motivated Schütz in the composition of his Der Psalter nach Cornelius Becker, a huge collection of partsongs, published in 1628. The composer departed Dresden for Venice on August 11, that same year, owing to economic hardship in Saxony from the ongoing Thirty Years War. Upon his return to Dresden in late 1629, he found economic conditions there no better. In fact, things worsened over the eight-year span (1633-1641) he spent mainly in the court of Prince Christian of Denmark. Schütz served most of the period of 1642-1644 in the Copenhagen court of Prince Johann Georg, though he remained officially tied to his Dresden post. The composer's Symphoniarum sacrarum secunda pars, a collection of sacred vocal works, appeared in 1647. After briefly taking a post in Duke Wilhelm's Weimar court in 1648, he spent several months in Weissenfels early the following year and then returned to Dresden. In 1650, Schütz published his collection, Symphoniarum sacrarum tertia pars.

The composer's output slowed to a trickle in his later years, but in the latter 1650s his financial situation, long precarious under Elector Johann Georg, improved when Johann Georg II succeeded his father, who died in 1656. Schütz did much traveling in his last years and lived in Weissenfels for most of his last decade. ~ Robert Cummings, All Music Guide