Heinrich Schütz

German composer

• Born: October 9, 1585 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Köstritz, Reuss(now Bad Köstritz, Germany)
• Died: November 6, 1672
• Place of death: Dresden, Saxony (now in Germany)

Schütz was the most important German composer of his era, and his works and pupils had an immense influence on the subsequent development of music in Germany. He is especially noted for combining German church music traditions with the newer Italian styles that had been developed in the early seventeenth century.

Early Life

Heinrich Schütz (HIN-rihk shuhyts) was born into a family of prosperous innkeepers near the capital of the principality of Reuss. The exact day of Schütz’s birth is disputed, but he was baptized on October 9. His father, Christoph, had been town clerk in Gera before taking over the Golden Crane Inn in Köstritz. Heinrich was the second of eleven children in a close-knit family.

In the summer before Heinrich turned five, the family moved to Weissenfels, where his father had inherited an inn, the Golden Ring. Christoph provided a good religious and liberal arts education for his children, and Heinrich showed a special talent for music, becoming a fine singer. His voice attracted the attention of Langrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel when this learned and musical nobleman stayed at the Schütz family inn. Moritz persuaded Schütz’s parents to send Heinrich to his court in Kassel, where the lad served as a choirboy and studied at the Collegium Mauritianum, displaying a special gift for languages—Latin, Greek, and French—as well as music.

It was not the intention of Schütz or his parents that he take up music as a profession; therefore, in the fall of 1608, he entered the University of Marburg to study for a career in law. Once again, however, Moritz intervened in his life by offering to send Schütz to Venice to study music with the renowned Giovanni Gabrieli . This was an exciting prospect for Schütz, and it was not difficult to convince him to postpone his legal studies.

The rich musical life of Venice and the inspiration of Gabrieli and his compositions had a profound influence on Schütz. He acquired a thorough knowledge of contrapuntal writing and published a book of five-voice madrigals as a demonstration of his achievements at the end of his initial two-year stay. He received high praise for his madrigals and for his organ playing, even substituting as organist for Gabrieli on occasion. His study in Venice was extended for a third year and even beyond but was ended by the death of Gabrieli in August of 1612. A close relationship had developed between Schütz and his teacher; Gabrieli gave Schütz one of his rings on his deathbed, and Schütz spoke of Gabrieli only in terms of highest praise.

When Schütz returned to Germany, he assumed a position as second organist at Moritz’s court. He also gave serious consideration to his family’s urging to return to his legal studies. He probably would have done so but for a request from Johann Georg I, elector of Saxony, for Schütz to come to Dresden to assist with the musical festivities in conjunction with the baptism of the elector’s son. Schütz spent several weeks at the elector’s court during the fall of 1614, and the next April the elector requested that Moritz lend him Schütz for a two-year period. Although Moritz protested and later tried to regain the services of the musician he had discovered and cultivated, Schütz left Kassel in August, 1615, for what turned out to be a lifetime position in the service of the elector of Saxony.

Life’s Work

Any remaining doubts that Schütz or his family had about his pursuing a musical career were now resolved by his appointment at one of the most important courts in Europe. When he arrived in Dresden in 1615, he took on the duties of Kapellmeister, even though he was not officially given that title until three or four years later.

As music director for the court, Schütz’s responsibilities included directing the performances for important religious and political ceremonies, composing much of the music that was presented, and hiring and supervising the musicians of the court. Moreover, he instructed the choirboys, taking a special interest in those who showed promise in musical composition. Among his pupils were several who became well-known composers, Heinrich Albert, Christoph Bernhard, Johann Theile, and Matthias Weckmann.

In 1619, Schütz published the Psalmen Davids (Psalms of David) a collection of twenty-six psalm settings that, in their use of multiple choirs with eight to twenty voice parts and accompanying instruments, show the influence of Gabrieli and the Venetian style. At about the same time as the publication of the Psalmen Davids, Schütz married Magdalena Wildeck, the eighteen-year-old daughter of an electoral court official. Two daughters were born to the couple, but after only six years of an especially happy marriage, Magdalena contracted smallpox and died on September 6, 1625. After his wife’s death, Schütz spent more than a year making musical settings of the psalm paraphrases written by a Leipzig theologian, Cornelius Becker. Schütz derived great comfort from his work with these psalms and later (1628) published them as a collection known as the Becker Psalter .

In the spring of 1627, Schütz composed Dafne , the first opera written in German, set to an adaptation of a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini. The score for this work, like most of Schütz’s secular compositions, has not survived. Toward the end of the 1620’s, economic conditions at the Saxon court deteriorated through the increasing financial drain of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Because no elaborate ceremonies requiring music would be likely in such troubled times, and because Schütz wished to learn more about current musical activities in Italy, he requested a leave to travel for a second time to Venice.

Schütz found the prevailing musical style of Venice in the late 1620’s to be quite different from that which he had known there twenty years earlier. The famous Claudio Monteverdi was now the leading musical figure, and his perfection of the style of dramatic monody was of great interest to the German composer. Schütz wrote that he learned “how a comedy of diverse voices can be translated into declamatory style and be brought to the stage and enacted in song,” a practice that was “still completely unknown in Germany.” Schütz’s stay was slightly more than a year this time; before he left, he published a collection of Latin church music with instruments, Symphoniae sacrae (1629; sacred symphonies), which includes works showing the influence of the new monodic style he encountered during his stay in Venice.

When he returned to Dresden late in 1629, Schütz found conditions unimproved; any hope for betterment of the situation was ended by the official entry of Saxony into the Thirty Years’ War in 1631. Over the next two years, musical activity declined to almost nothing, and Schütz spent extended periods of time during the next twelve years serving in other places. He served as director of music for the Danish court in Copenhagen from 1633 to 1635, and again from 1642 to 1644. In 1639 and 1640, he was in a similar position in Hanover and Hildesheim. Schütz continued to compose, whether he was away directing the music for a foreign court or at home in Saxony trying to do the best he could to preserve what was left of the musical establishment there. In 1636 and 1639, he published two books of Kleine geistliche Concerte (little sacred concerti), church music written for performance forces appropriate for the times—one to five solo voices and organ.

On May 21, 1645, Schütz wrote a letter to the elector, requesting retirement from active service as Kapellmeister so that he could devote himself to completing various musical compositions; however, Johann Georg did not permit his music director to retire at this time and persistently ignored or rejected similar requests from Schütz over the next eleven years. In 1647, Schütz published the second part of his Symphoniae sacrae, consisting of large-scale works that he had written earlier for performance in Copenhagen. In the next year, he published Geistliche Chormusik (sacred choral music), a very influential collection of twenty-nine motets in five to seven parts, vocal and instrumental, which emphasized independent polyphonic writing. The third book of Symphoniae sacrae, published in 1650, included works written for larger performing forces than Schütz had employed since Psalmen Davids of 1619.

Schütz’s desire to retire from active direction of musical performances at the court was realized only when Johann Georg died in 1656; his son and successor, Johann Georg II, granted the seventy-one-year-old composer his pension and the retention of the title of Senior Kapellmeister. Even though Schütz retired to Weissenfels and wrote works for the new elector only on special occasions, he remained very active. He visited the Dresden court three or four times a year, traveled and assisted with music at other courts, revised and expanded his Becker Psalter, and continued to produce new compositions, including several important works of the oratorio type.

Two authentic portraits of Schütz exist, one a formal court pose, painted by Christoph Spetner when the composer was about sixty-five. The other is an anonymous miniature in oils, dated 1670, which shows the eighty-five-year-old composer with the lines of age clearly visible in his face but with a strong stance and intense gaze giving evidence of a still vital and forceful personality. At about the same time that this portrait was painted, Schütz returned to Dresden to spend his last days. On November 6, 1672, he suffered a fatal stroke. His funeral was held on November 17 at the Frauenkirche, with members of the court chapel performing some of his compositions. He was buried in a place of honor near the chancel of the church.

Significance

Schütz was both the greatest German composer of the seventeenth century and one of the most important and influential figures in the musical development of the entire Baroque era. He firmly established a musical style that combined German seriousness and sensitive treatment of text with Italian ideas of dramatic monody and the Venetian concerted and polychoral style. By so doing he shaped the direction that German Baroque music would take for the next one hundred years.

Over a long and active career, he composed in all of the genres of music used in his time except independent instrumental music. Unfortunately, many of Schütz’s works have not survived; major eighteenth century fires in both Dresden and Copenhagen as well as the usual ravages of time were responsible for the destruction of many of his manuscripts, including the opera and ballet scores he is known to have produced. Despite the evidence of his composition of secular music, it is clear that his greatest interest and contribution was in the field of church music.

Approximately five hundred works by Schütz are extant, most of them included in the fourteen collections that were published during his lifetime. Among these collections, all but the first, his book of madrigals, consist of religious pieces, mainly settings of biblical texts. Although he did set Latin texts, German was the language that Schütz used in the vast majority of his compositions, and scholars credit the skillful utilization of this language for much of the incisive strength and feeling of urgency contained in Schütz’s music.

The period from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century is an important time in German Protestant music, sometimes described as the golden age of Lutheran church music. It is clear that Schütz stands as the dominant figure at the beginning of this major development in Baroque music.

Bibliography

Moser, Hans Joachim. Heinrich Schütz: A Short Account of His Life and Works. Edited and translated by Derek McCulloch. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967. A concise version of the author’s definitive 1959 study. Gives a clear account of Schütz’s life and brief discussions of his major works with some musical examples.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Heinrich Schütz: His Life and Work. Translated by Carl F. Pfatteicher. St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1959. A monumental biography of the composer that treats both his life and his compositions in great detail. This is the standard work in an excellent English translation. Includes illustrations, lists of works, and extensive musical examples.

Petzoldt, Richard, and D. Berke. Heinrich Schütz und seine Zeit in Bildern. Kassel, Germany: Barenreiter, 1972. A most interesting and helpful collection of pictures and reproductions related to Schütz and his time. Arranged chronologically and accompanied by a commentary in both English and German.

Schütz, Heinrich. The Letters and Documents of Heinrich Schütz, 1656-1672: An Annotated Translation. Edited by Gina Spagnoli. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. Presents letters and documents from the second half of Schütz’s life in the original German with English translations and critical commentary.

Skei, Allen B. Heinrich Schütz: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland, 1981. A valuable source on Schütz and his time. The main part of this work is a 632-item annotated and classified bibliography that covers not only Schütz’s life and works but also the general and musical background of his time, his reputation, and the performance of his works since his death.

Smallman, Basil. Schütz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. The first comprehensive English-language biography of Schütz to be published in many years. Smallman provides a chronological account of Schütz’s life and the creation of his musical compositions.