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Johann Schein

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Johann Hermann Schein
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(born Jan. 20, 1586, Grünhain, Saxony — died Nov. 19, 1630, Leipzig) German composer. After singing as a boy in the chapel of the elector of Saxony, he studied music at the University of Leipzig. In 1616 he became cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, the post later held by Johann Sebastian Bach. In this capacity, he was an important teacher, became friends with Samuel Scheidt and Heinrich Schütz, and wrote sacred works that combined the vocal lyricism of Italian music with the Northern contrapuntal style. His Banchetto musicale (1617) is a collection of dances, perhaps the first in which dances are gathered into unified suites, with common thematic motifs. His sacred vocal works include Opella nova (1618 – 26) and the hymn collection Cantional (1627).

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Music Encyclopedia: Johann Hermann Schein
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(b Grünhain, 20 Jan 1586; d Leipzig, 19 Nov 1630). German composer andpoet. Trained as a soprano in the Dresden court chapel, he studied at Schulpforta and Leipzig and later worked as music director and tutor to the children of Gottfried von Wolffersdorff, 1613-15. After a year as Kapellmeister at the Weimar court, he became Kantor of St Thomas's, Leipzig - a post later held by Bach - in 1616. His pupils included Heinrich Albert; he knew both Schütz, a close friend, and Scheidt.

Primarily a composer for the voice, Schein was significant as one of the first composers to graft the modern Italian style on to the traditional elements of Lutheran church music. Much of his large sacred vocal output (nearly 400 works) is in five published volumes. The first part of Opella nova (1618) contains sacred concertos with continuo, clearly influenced by Viadana's but based (in most cases) on chorale melodies; the second part (1626), which uses fewer chorales, includes obbligato instrumental parts. His other sacred publications are a motet collection (1615), a book of sacred madrigals (1623) and the Cantional (1627), a hymnbook. Schein left some 90 secular vocal pieces, all of them to his own texts. Especially Italianate are the three-part settings in Musica boscareccia (1621 -8) and his German continuo madrigals (1624-the first such works to be published). He also composed songs and many occasional works. His main instrumental work is the Banchetto musicale (1617), containing 20 variation suites.


German Literature Companion: Johann Hermann Schein
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Schein, Johann Hermann (Grünhain, 1586-1630, Leipzig), composer and poet, who at thirteen was a singer at the Dresden court. After a period at the electoral school Schulpforta he studied in Leipzig. In 1613 he took up an appointment in Weißenfels and in 1615 became Kapellmeister at the Weimar court. From 1616 to his death he was cantor at St Thomas's Church, Leipzig.

Primarily a composer of vocal works, Schein wrote both sacred and secular music. Among the former are Cymbalum Sionium (1615), Opella nova (pt. 1, 1618; pt. 2, 1626), Fontana d'Israel or Israelis Brünlein (1623) with texts taken from the Old Testament, and his Cantional Oder Gesangbuch Augspurgischer Confession (1627) which contains 41 hymns written by Schein himself. Schein's reputation also rests on his contribution to the secular baroque song, writing the text for around 100. The first collection, Venus-Kräntzlein (1609), leans both musically and textually on the tradition of the German folk-song (see Volkslied), whereas the texts of his particularly popular Musica boscareccia or Wald-Liederlein (pt. 1, 1621; pt. 2, 1626; pt. 3, 1628) and Diletti pastorali or Hirten Lust (1624) reflect the Italian pastoral tradition. Studenten Schmausz (1626) is a collection of five drinking songs.

Artist: Johann Hermann Schein
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Johann Hermann Schein
  • Period: Baroque (1600-1749)
  • Country: Germany
  • Born: January 20, 1586 in Grünhain, Germany
  • Died: November 19, 1630 in Leipzig, Germany
  • Genres: Chamber Music

Biography

Johann Hermann Schein was born within a year of both Heinrich Schütz and Samuel Scheidt. Together, these three composers forged a new identity for German music during the early Baroque period, combining the traditional Germanic emphasis on contrapuntal setting of Lutheran chorales with modern stylistic innovations from Italy. In addition to his activities as a composer and poet, Schein is remembered as one of J.S. Bach's predecessors as Kantor of St. Thomas in Leipzig.

Although he was born in the small town of Grünhain in 1586, Schein spent most of his childhood years in Dresden. He showed musical promise as a child, and in 1599 was accepted into the choir of the Elector of Saxony as a boy soprano. Schein's musical education continued under the direct guidance of the court's Kapellmeister, and when his voice broke, he left the Kapelle in May of 1603 to enroll at the prestigious Schulpforta School for Music and the Humanities. After briefly returning to Dresden in 1607, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study music, literature, and law, remained there for four years. While a student there, he also published his first work, Venus Kräntzlein, a musical setting of his own poems.

Although he had always divided his attention between music and literature, in 1615 Schein was offered the post of Kapellmeister to the Duke of Weimar. However, his time at Weimar was cut short when he successfully auditioned for the job of Kantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig in late 1616. During the 1620s, Schein suffered a number of personal misfortunes, which impeded his successful professional life. His first wife died in 1624, and most or possibly all of the children born by his second wife, whom he married in 1625, died before reaching adulthood. In addition, Schein's health was declining, and, after suffering tuberculosis, scurvy and kidney stones for most of his adult life, he died in 1630, at the age of 44.

Unlike his close friend and colleague Samuel Scheidt, whose fame rests largely on the merits of his instrumental music, Schein was essentially a composer of vocal music. While his early sacred music draws heavily on the motets of Lassus and Bodenschatz -- whose compilation of motets was used for musical instruction at the Schulpforta -- Schein later developed a more modern style of sacred vocal concerto with basso continuo. The Opella nova of 1618 contains some of the earliest examples of this revolutionary new form. The texts used in his secular music are entirely his own; the music, like his work for sacred occasions, develops over time from a relatively simple, homophonic style, as in the early Venus Kräntzlein. More complex textures featuring greater vocal independence and basso continuo appear in Hirten Lust, published in 1624, the first collection of German madrigals with basso continuo. ~ Blair Johnston, All Music Guide
Wikipedia: Johann Schein
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Johann Hermann Schein

Johann Hermann Schein (January 20, 1586 – November 19, 1630) was a German composer of the early Baroque era. He was born in Grünhain and died in Leipzig. He was one of the first to import the early Italian stylistic innovations into German music, and was one of the most polished composers of the period.

Contents

Biography

On the death of his father, Schein moved to Dresden where he joined the choir of the Elector of Saxony as a boy soprano. In addition to singing in the choir, he received a thorough musical training with Rogier Michael, the Kapellmeister, who recognized his extraordinary talent. From 1603 to 1607 he studied at Pforta, and from 1608 to 1612 attended the University of Leipzig, where he studied law in addition to liberal arts. Upon graduating, he was employed briefly by Gottfried von Wolffersdorff as the house music director and tutor to his children; later he became Kapellmeister at Weimar, and shortly thereafter became cantor at Thomasschule zu Leipzig, a post which he held for the rest of his life.


Unlike his friend Heinrich Schütz, he was afflicted with poor health, and was not to live a happy or long life. His wife died in childbirth; four of his five children died in infancy; he died at age 44, having suffered from tuberculosis, gout, scurvy and a kidney disorder.

Style

Schein was one of the first to absorb the innovations of the Italian Baroque—monody, the concertato style, figured bass—and use them effectively in a German Lutheran context. While Schütz made more than one trip to Italy, Schein apparently spent his entire life in Germany, making his grasp of the Italianate style all the more remarkable. His early concertato music seems to have been modeled on Lodovico Grossi da Viadana's Cento concerti ecclesiastici, which was available in an edition prepared in Germany.

Unlike Schütz, who composed only sacred music (except for an early and unrepresentative collection of madrigals), Schein wrote sacred and secular music in approximately equal quantities, and almost all of it was vocal. In his secular vocal music he wrote all of his own texts. Throughout his life he published alternating collections of sacred and secular music, in accordance with an intention he stated early on — in the preface to the Banchetto musicale — to publish alternately music for use in worship and social gatherings. The contrast between the two kinds of music can be quite extreme. While some of his sacred music uses the most sophisticated techniques of the Italian madrigal for a devotional purpose, several of his secular collections include such things as drinking songs of a surprising simplicity and humor. Some of his works attain an expressive intensity matched in Germany only by those of Schütz, for example the spectacular Fontana d'Israel or Israel's Brünnlein (1623), in which Schein declared his intent to exhaust the possibilities of German word-painting "in the style of the Italian madrigal."

Possibly his most famous collection was his only collection of instrumental music, the Banchetto musicale (Musical banquet) (1617) which contains 20 separate variation suites; they are among the earliest, and most perfect, representatives of the form. Most likely they were composed as dinner music for the courts of Weissenfels and Weimar, and were intended to be performed on viols. They consist of dances: a pavan-galliard (a normal early Baroque pair), a courante, and then an allemande-tripla. Each suite in the Banchetto is unified by mode as well as by theme.

Works

Sacred vocal

  • Cymbalum Sionium (1615)
  • Opella nova, geistlicher Concerten (1618)
  • Fontana d'Israel, Israelis Brünlein (1623)
  • Opella nova, ander Theil, geistlicher Concerten (1626)
  • Cantional oder Gesangbuch Augspurgischer Confession (1627, 1645)

Secular vocal

  • Venus Kräntzlein (1609)
  • Musica boscareccia (1621, and several portions published later)
  • Diletti pastorali, Hirten Lust (1624)
  • Studenten-Schmauss (1626)

Instrumental

  • Banchetto musicale (1617)

References

  • Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1947. ISBN 0-393-09745-5
  • Article "Johann Hermann Schein," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2

External links


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