Heinrich Schütz is indeed a prophet in his land

The tenors Christopher Fischer and Olivier Berten, and the bass Lionel Meunier, director of Vox Luminis, during the concert offered by the group on Saturday afternoon in the Weißenfels palace church.Mathias Marx

As chance would have it, the three greatest German baroque composers (with the permission of Dieterich Buxtehude) came into the world exactly a century apart: Heinrich Schütz was born in Köstritz (now Bad Köstritz) in 1585, while Georg Friedrich Händel (in Halle ) and Johann Sebastian Bach (in Eisenach) saw the light in 1685 (the same year as Domenico Scarlatti in Naples).

The three towns are not far from each other and are part of the

of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.

Of the three, Händel (or Handel after Anglicizing his last name during his long stay in England, his adoptive country) is the only one who has enjoyed uninterrupted fame.

Bach's death in Leipzig in 1750 went unnoticed by everyone and it was the creation of the Bach-Gesellschaft just a century later, which set itself the herculean task of publishing his complete works, most of them still unpublished, and the determined impulse of various romantic composers, devoted admirers of the author of

which changed his fate forever and raised him to the top of the Western musical canon.

At least outside of Germany, Heinrich (or Henrich, as he used to sign) Schütz still needs lawyers to remember that, in his time, he was considered the “Orpheus of our time” and the “father of modern music”.

The first trial is due to Martin Opitz, the most important German poet of his time, and is part of a consolatory poet written on the occasion of the death of the composer's wife, Magdalena, in 1625, when the composer was only forty years old and he still had nearly half a century to live.

Opitz was also the librettist for

an opera by Schütz performed in Torgau in 1627 and whose music has unfortunately been lost.

The second description is due to Elias Nathasius, who at his request to occupy the place of Thomaskantor in Leipzig (the same prestigious post held by Bach from 1723) after the death of Tobias Michael in 1657, stated that he did not fear any musician except for Schütz, whom he defines, effectively, as "

".

In 1690, eighteen years after the composer's death, in what was the first great written history of German music, Wolfgang Caspar Printz stated that "around the year 1650 he was considered the best German composer", exalting him as one of the three illustrious eses of the music of their country together with Johann Hermann Schein and Samuel Scheidt.

Bass Sebastian Myrus, tenors Philippe Froeliger and Vojtěch Semerád, and soprano Stefanie True during a performance of Samuel Scheidt's 'Vater uns im Himmelreich' by Vox Luminis.Mathias Marx

He has always argued against Schütz that almost all of his music —always vocal— is of a religious nature and was composed from German texts: the almost only exceptions are his

, published in Venice in 1611 and with poems in Italian, naturally, and his

, of 1625, and the first book of

, printed in Venice in 1629, both with Latin texts.

Although practically all his works were published during Schütz's lifetime, the first modern and manageable edition did not begin to be printed until 1885 under the direction of the musicologist Philipp Spitta, who in turn was responsible for a great biography of Bach, which provided a great deal of information unknown at the time. who proposed a chronology of his religious output that modern manuscript dating techniques would largely dismantle by the middle of the last century.

The first volumes of Schütz's complete works would have a great influence, for example, on Johannes Brahms, a friend of Spitta and an avid subscriber to Bach's first

, which would not be complete until shortly after the death of the author of

.

Schütz's life changed forever when his employer at the time, Landgrave Moritz von Hessen-Kassel, paid for a two-year stay in Venice so that he could study with Giovanni Gabrieli from 1609, which would then last until after Schütz's death. Italian musician in August 1612. A century later, another trip to the “land where the lemon tree flourishes” would also leave a profound mark on another young composer brimming with talent and ambition: Georg Friedrich Händel.

Bach did not have that privilege, but he did manage to amass an encyclopedic knowledge of Italian music clearly perceptible in many of his compositions.

In Schütz's works, for his part, not only Gabrieli's heritage is heard, but also, and very clearly, that of Claudio Monteverdi,

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No trap, no cardboard

His aforementioned book of madrigals, his first publication, showed that Schütz, at the age of twenty-six, was already capable of passing himself off as just another Italian.

But, after returning to his country, he was quickly called to the Saxon electoral court in Dresden, where he would develop his entire career and where he remained uninterruptedly as

until his death, holding the position for no less than 57 years, a figure difficult to match. .

There his main function was to supply music for the various liturgical services of a still fully Lutheran court (with the arrival of Augustus the Strong it would become Catholic, hence Bach's attempts to gain a position through his

).

And the various collections that he published from 1619 (the

) tacitly proclaimed themselves heirs to his Venetian teachings and to the customary practice of polychoral music in St. Mark's Basilica, which he had learned firsthand alongside Giovanni Gabrieli.

At the end of his life, the three Passions were born on the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, largely monophonic and a paragon of severity and austerity, the

,

or his

, a series of double-choir motets from Psalm 119 (complete), Psalm 100, and the German

(

).

Completed and published in Dresden in 1671, months before his death, aged 86, it appeared under the title of his swan song, his

, the same title that Tobias Haslinger would posthumously give in 1829 to some of Franz's last songs. Schubert.

Facade of Heinrich Schütz's house in Weißenfels, today converted into a model museum dedicated to the life and work of the composer.LG

The two inaugural concerts of the Heinrich Schütz Musikfest have been held in two very important locations in his biography.

Weißenfels was the place where his family moved when the future composer was only five years old and where he in turn retired, together with his little sister Justine, for the last fifteen years of his life.

This is poetically recalled by a plaque on the façade of what was his house: “In this house the great composer Heinrich Schütz spent the twilight of his life: 1651-1672 ″ (1651 is the date of his acquisition). ).

Located on Nikolaistraße in Weißenfels, in 2012 it became a museum that should serve as a model for other similar ones: as a didactic project, as an exhibition model and as an aesthetic experience,

borders on perfection and should be a must for anyone who comes to this area of ​​Saxony where the scars left by the years of lead of the German Democratic Republic are still very visible.

Neu-Augustusburg, the imposing palace of the town, attests that for several decades, in better times than today, it was the place of residence of the Dukes of Saxe-Weißenfels and its baroque church was the scene of the opening concert of the festival last Saturday afternoon.

Lovers of German Romanticism will no doubt associate Weißenfels with the poet and philosopher Novalis, who worked in the local salt mines and lived the last stretch of his short life here.

the imposing palace of the town, attests that for several decades, in better times than today, it was the place of residence of the Dukes of Saxe-Weißenfels and its baroque church was the scene of the festival's opening concert last Saturday for the afternoon.

Lovers of German Romanticism will no doubt associate Weißenfels with the poet and philosopher Novalis, who worked in the local salt mines and lived the last stretch of his short life here.

the imposing palace of the town, attests that for several decades, in better times than today, it was the place of residence of the Dukes of Saxe-Weißenfels and its baroque church was the scene of the festival's opening concert last Saturday for the afternoon.

Lovers of German Romanticism will no doubt associate Weißenfels with the poet and philosopher Novalis, who worked in the local salt mines and lived the last stretch of his short life here.

Gera has more traces of a small city, which was the capital of the region in which Schütz was born and which in turn was part of the Principality of Reuss.

Here the composer's father, Christoph, worked as a municipal clerk, and his mother, Euphrosyne, was the daughter of the Gera mayor, although the family moved to Weißenfels in 1590, when the future composer was only five years old, so that his father take over an inn that his grandfather had left him as an inheritance.

Prince Heinrich Posthumus von Reuss also lived in Gera (the posthumous nickname is due to the fact that his father, from whom he inherited the title, died two months before he was born), who managed to keep it largely out of the bloody War of the Thirty Years.

And the sovereign's death is directly linked to one of Schütz's most famous works, his

, which was performed, of course, at the concert on Saturday.

For connoisseurs of modern art, Gera will be a household name because Otto Dix was born here, whose birthplace is today a museum dedicated to the painter.

Memorial plaque on the facade of the house in Weißenfels where Heinrich Schütz spent the last fifteen years of his life.LG

With excellent criteria, the festival has named the resident ensemble for this year's edition, when the 350th anniversary of the composer's death is commemorated, the group that has proven to be the best current performer of his music: Vox Luminis.

A decade has passed since it was presented at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in 2012, at the Pieterskerk, as a still perfectly unknown group, arousing the amazement of locals and strangers.

The previous year his recording of Schütz's

Gramophone

magazine

as the best of the year, in any category: the triumph of David against Goliath.

His interpretation in Weißenfels of this profound reflection on death (with texts meticulously chosen and engraved on his coffin before his death by Heinrich Posthumus von Reuss) has certainly not been the best of the many that have been offered in recent years by around the world (twice at the National Auditorium in Madrid, for example).

Its discreet director, the bass Lionel Meunier, was obviously ill, there were singers who had recently joined the group and even a very young German soprano (Malwine Nicolaus) who sang with them for the first time on Saturday.

Nor did this effort to applaud help at all, which completely breaks the internal dynamics of the program, which began with a hymn by Luther and which included, after the

funerals of Schütz, funeral pages of Samuel Scheidt, Thomas Selle, Andreas Hammerschmidt and Schütz himself.

It is not surprising that two of the texts (

and

) are also part of

by Johannes Brahms, the closest thing to other musical obsequies in the midst of German musical Romanticism.

The singers began by singing Luther's hymn in unison, scattered around the altar and the sides of the only nave of the church.

Philippe Froeliger excelled in the

solo

, for five voices, and in the

the

, with two choirs of four voices each (the second of them withdrawn inside the sacristy).

The other pieces sounded less rounded, especially

by Samuel Scheidt, with too many ups and downs in its eight sections (first and last for eight voices) or

by Andreas Hammerschmidt.

Outside the programme, the flight took off again, and in what way, with the music composed by Schütz for Luther's translation of the

Latin

.

Heard in Weißenfels, very close to the composer's house, this music redoubled his dramatic power even more.

The public that almost filled the church experienced, like so many others whenever Vox Luminis offers this program, or one very similar, a real shock, because there is a before and after in the interpretive history of the

and we have had the fortunate to be able to live that turning point: no one should miss out on the experience.

Appearance of the Neu-Agustusburg church in Weißenfels during the inaugural concert of Vox Luminis.Mathias Marx

The St. Johanniskirche, where Schütz's great funeral work was originally performed on February 4, 1636, was the scene of the second Vox Luminis concert at the festival on Sunday afternoon, which brought master and disciple face to face : several of Giovanni Gabrieli's “sacred symphonies” (from the second collection published in Venice in 1615) contrasted with seven of his disciple's “Psalms of David” (his opus 2, which was published in Dresden four years later) .

The Italian block was completed with

, which is only preserved in a manuscript source in Kassel, which suggests a decisive intervention by Schütz himself, since it was there that he worked in the service of Landgrave Moritz von Hessen-Kassel until he joined the Dresden electoral court.

The intimacy and sobriety of the

(with a viola da gamba and a positive organ as all instrumental accompaniment) contrasted a few hours later with the exuberance of the polychoral music born in the

or of clear Venetian roots.

String and wind instruments were allied or opposed to the voices (choir and chapel) in a display of contrapuntal ingenuity and antiphonal wisdom.

It is not easy to interpret these works with so many independent parts, especially outside of St. Mark's Basilica, their natural location.

In general, Gabrieli's pieces sounded somewhat more confused, too undifferentiated, without clear profiles for each of the component blocks, than Schütz's, where all of Lionel Meunier's decisions regarding the placement of singers and instrumentalists (in constant movement ) or the use of solo voices accompanied by instruments resulted in much greater clarity.

Display of singers and instrumentalists from Vox Luminis at their concert on Saturday at the St. Johanniskirche in Gera.Friederike Böcher

Few composers have written for the human voice and been able to better understand prosody or enhance the theological content of a text more effectively than Heinrich Schütz.

Gabrieli 's final

, with fourteen independent parts, already paved the way for the wonders wrought by his disciple.

Meunier decided to repeat the beginning of

(the same text from the previous day), first only with instruments and then with the addition of voices, and the use of soloists, sometimes placed in front of the altar, or on the sides. , clearly isolated and separated from the rest of the choir, performed magnificently in

(with tenor Vojtěch Semerád and bass Sebastian Myrus as soloists, both admirable) or

(with a solo quartet in the center of the altar).

In the last two pieces,

(with only a tenor and instruments in the second chorus) and

(which returned to the semicircular arrangement, but with better results than in Gabrieli ), with the recorder required by Schütz when the text of Psalm 150 explicitly refers to “

”, perhaps the highest level of the entire concert was reached, which unleashed the enthusiasm of the public.

Three Spaniards were part of Vox Luminis this time: the tenor André Pérez Muíño, the cornetist Carlos Rivera (very confident at all times, despite what he said on his part) and Victoria Cassano, a young but already veteran of the group and an infallible prop of the soprano block.

Vox Luminis' third concert at the Heinrich Schütz Musikfest is scheduled for Sunday afternoon at the Dreikönigskirche in Dresden, the Saxon capital and Schütz's place of professional residence for much of his professional life.

In this case, his music will be twinned with that of Johann Sebastian Bach's ancestors, including his great-uncle Johann Christoph, whom he honored as a "profound composer."

But at the same time, the premiere at the Berlin Staatsoper of

the third day of

in the new production by Dmitri Tcherniakov.

For the music of Heinrich Schütz, or

in the Latin translation of his name and surname that we sometimes read in the sources, there is, however, no possible sunset.