Heinrich Schütz - Musikalische Exequien

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) was as much a master of the early German Baroque style as J.S.Bach was of its culmination. As a native of the Saxon town of Köstritz, he was a subject of the Reuss family. While he served in many other courts, he remained close for at least twenty years to Prince Heinrich der Jüngere von Reuss (1572-1635), named “Posthumus” because he was born two months after the death of his father.

Prince Heinrich was a highly respected humanist, diplomat, patron of the arts, and amateur musician. As a devout Lutheran, he also gave considerable thought to the contemplation of his own death and the meaning of life in the broader theological context of the kingdom of God. In his case, he not only went to the trouble of secretly designing his casket with biblical and hymn texts placed in a specific relational form on the various panels of the casket, but 20th Century scholars came to believe that he commissioned his friend and subject Schütz to compose his requiem mass using these texts.

The primary evidence for this assumption is the striking similarity in the musical form of the arrangement of these texts with their arrangement on the rediscovered plan for the casket. Prince Heinrich’s inspired casket design seems to have evoked in Schütz one of his most exquisite formal musical designs, long since considered one of the great masterpieces of the era.

Rhetorical contrasts and symmetries abound. The texts are arranged with the passages affirming life and salvation at the head of the casket and the texts about sin and death at the foot. Perhaps the most audibly striking aspect of Schütz’s musical setting is the way he sharply changes the character of the music to reflect these contrasting emotions.

Pairs of verses from the same hymns are found on opposite sides of the casket, and are arranged as part of an arch form holding together the sections of the long first movement, which corresponds to the Kyrie and Gloria of the Lutheran Mass. This arch form is reinforced in the “Gloria” section, texts dealing with the subjects of God, Saviour, human suffering, the relationship between God and people, and the power of God form a palindrome of themes (see texts and translations for guide).

While such advance contemplation of one’s death might seem somewhat morbid to the modern sensibility, for devout and learned people of the Renaissance era, when death was ever present and more likely to happen sooner than later, such meditation was a normal aspect of spiritual life. The texts chosen focus on God’s mercy, comfort for the grieving, and hope for redemption.

Two and a half centuries later, Schütz’s Musikalishe Exequien (“Musical Burial Service”) was adopted as a model by another great German composer, Johannes Brahms, for his Ein Deutsches Requiem (“A German Requiem”). Not only did Brahms use several of the same texts as Schütz (who was following Prince Heinrich’s plan), but he did so in a way that also paralleled and substituted German biblical texts for a standard liturgical text, in Brahms’ case the Latin requiem mass.

illustrations here are adapted from Textual Symmetries and the Origins of Heinrich Schütz’s “Musikalische Exequien” Author: Gregory S. Johnston; Source: Early Music, Vol. 19, No. 2, (May, 1991), pp. 213-225; Published by: Oxford University Press.

Benjamin Britten - Rejoice in the Lamb & Jubilate Deo

Benjamin Britten’s inspired setting of selected lines from the 18th Century English poet Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno can perhaps be best understood as an embodiment of Duke Ellington’s famous line from his Sacred Concerts: “Every man prays in his own language.”

This idea is found both in the delightful details of the poem, with its fanciful lists of creatures and instruments that praise God in their own manner, as well as in the This personal spiritual dilemma is poignantly expressed by Britten in the choral declamation “For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour….For I am in twelve Hardships” in the middle of the work. Britten surrounds this powerful lamentation with choral music of great rhythmic energy akin to the childlike playfulness of the poet and the more muted reflections by the soloists of the poet’s beloved cat, his cat’s beloved mouse, and the garden they shared.

Britten wrote Rejoice in 1943 during the same period as he was writing his monumental opera Peter Grimes. On very different scales, both works deal with the subject of the individual alienated from the narrow perspective of a judgmental society, a subject probably not unrelated to Britten’s own attempts to reconcile his homosexuality and fervent pacifism in the midst of the tumult of war-torn England. In Britten’s hands, Smart’s poetry and spiritual persona are revealed in their full humanity – the personal transformed into the transcendent, as great artists are given to do.

Britten’s Jubilate Deo is an exuberant anthem composed in very different times, in 1961. It nevertheless makes a nice pairing with the Lamb in that it boasts a Latin title for an English psalm translation, whereas the composer translated Christopher Smart’s original Latin title Jubilate Agno back into the English as Rejoice in the Lamb.