Note from webmaster: This piece was performed in the same program with Schönberg's Friede Auf Erden and Schumann's Choral Songs. Hence, the first two paragraphs reference these other two pieces and provide a context for the entire program.

his concert has to do with connections. We are exploring the special linkages that great composers establish with listeners, that tell us things that are otherwise inexpressible. All of the works in this program deal with pain of one sort or another, but also with hope and the possibility of remediation. It seems to me that music uniquely has the power to show how pain, and the cure for pain, are matched components in the continuum of human experience.

Schütz grieves over the pain of departure of a patron/friend in the context of a continent torn by thirty years of devastating war. Schönberg's startling clairvoyance, on the doorstep of the last century, lamenting mankind's historic failure to prevail in the war against war itself turned out to be ominously predictive of the horrible events to come. And Schumann brings pain down to an intensely intimate level in music that captures the very essence of young lovers experiencing the kind of pain that young lovers experience.

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), began his musical life as a boy soprano, a skill that made possible his education as a choir boy in the German city of Kassel. After his voice broke he enrolled in the study of law at Marburg University, but a musical patron, Prince Moritz of Nesse, recognized that Schütz's musical abilities surpassed the world's need for another lawyer. In 1607, under the prince's auspices, the young man was sent off to Venice, the reigning musical capital of Europe, to study organ and composition with Giovanni Gabrieli. After Gabrieli's death in 1612, he returned to Germany and took up the position of court organist in Marburg. In 1617, Schütz was appointed court conductor at Dresden, a position he held until his death. There was a long interruption in that pleasant and productive court tenure, however. Life in Dresden, as in most of Europe, became unsettled due to the outbreak of the Thirty-Years War (1618-1648), a series of declared and undeclared wars that turned into one of the great conflicts of early modern European history. So, Schütz was off again to Venice, this time to study with Monteverdi, returning to Dresden in 1630, where he remained until his death, at the age of eighty-seven.

During Schütz's lifetime the Renaissance evolved into the Baroque, a change that was led by the Italian masters, some of the greatest of whom were Schütz's mentors and colleagues. Back home in Germany, he forged a unique amalgamation of northern and southern styles, bringing with him from Italy the polychoral and antiphonal practices of Gabrieli and the inspiration of Monteverdi's dramatically lively elaborated melodic lines, use of basso continuo and concerted styles.

The Musicalische Exequien, from 1636, was commissioned by Heinrich Posthumus "the younger" of Reuss-Gera, an educated and cultivated ruler. When he was over sixty, he started to make preparations for his death. These preparations included an exact plan specifying what was to happen at the funeral ceremony and in which sequence. He commissioned Schütz to write music based on this plan.

The work is made up of three movements: I, an extended, non-liturgical parody of the German Protestant Missa Brevis but with extensive interpolations from Scripture, sung by various groupings of soloists in the style of sacred concertos, and of familiar German Choral texts, sung by the full capella (chorus); II, a double-chorus motet; and, III, a setting of the Song of Simeon (Nunc dimittis) with a three-voice antiphonal obligato to the text, "Blessed are the dead."

Liturgically, the work is a hybrid. It bears a greater kinship to Brahms's Requiem (and in fact was a model for the later work-Brahms knew Schütz's music well and borrowed extensively from Schütz's style in many of his works, especially the ones for chorus) than to a traditional funeral service. Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary is another comparison.

Few will have the opportunity to commission a work of such profound depth and beauty to honor our passing. Fewer still will have what Prince Heinrich had: the experience of hearing such a work performed before the event it commemorated occurred. And while we must be grateful to Prince Heinrich, who had the wisdom to commission it, we are ever so much more grateful to Heinrich Schütz, who created this masterpiece, and in so doing allowed succeeding generations including our own to celebrate his/our life and work in perpetuity.

The Boston Cecilia performed this piece at Emmanuel Church in Boston on October 16, 2004.

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.