Heinrich Schütz

Heinrich Schütz was born on 8 October 1585 at Köstritz in Thuringia, into a family of innkeepers and local notables. In 1590 the family moved to Weissenfels, where his father ran the Golden Arch inn. One day in 1598 Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, a cultivated prince and composer himself, stopped at the inn and heard young Heinrich sing. Charmed, he offered to take him to his court. The parents eventually agreed, and in 1599 the boy joined the chapel choir in Kassel, where he received an excellent general education.

His parents nevertheless wanted him to pursue a legal career: in 1608 he enrolled at the University of Marburg. But in 1609 Landgrave Moritz offered him a grant to study in Venice with Giovanni Gabrieli, organist of St Mark’s and master of grand multi-choir effects. Schütz stayed until 1612 and in 1611 published a book of five-voice Italian madrigals of great mastery. When Gabrieli died he left Schütz one of his rings as a token of esteem.

Back in Germany he became organist in Kassel, but the Elector of Saxony, Johann Georg I, wanted him for his court in Dresden, one of the most powerful in Germany. After long negotiations Moritz had to give way, and around 1617 Schütz became Kapellmeister in Dresden, a post he kept for nearly fifty-five years. In 1619 he published the Psalmen Davids, multi-choir psalms in the Venetian style, and married Magdalena Wildeck, who died in 1625 after only six years of marriage, leaving him two daughters.

In 1627 he composed Dafne, the first opera in German, for a princely wedding; sadly the music is lost. In 1628 he returned to Venice, where he met Monteverdi and discovered the novelties of the Baroque style. But Germany was then ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48): the court’s finances collapsed, musicians went unpaid and the chapel shrank to a few singers. Schütz spent several years at the Danish court in Copenhagen and adapted his music to reduced forces.

It was in these difficult conditions that he composed some of his finest works. The Musikalische Exequien (1636), written for the funeral of Prince Heinrich Posthumus Reuss, is the first requiem in German. The Kleine geistliche Konzerte (1636 and 1639) are small sacred concertos for one to five voices. The three books of Symphoniae sacrae (1629, 1647, 1650) contain striking pieces such as Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich, in which the voice of Christ calls out to St Paul in a dramatic echo.

With peace restored, Schütz published in 1648 the Geistliche Chor-Music, a collection of motets in a severe polyphonic style, meant to show young composers the importance of counterpoint. Growing old, he asked several times to retire. He went on to write the Christmas Story (1664), of luminous tenderness, three Passions according to St Matthew, St Luke and St John, spare and austere, and finally, in 1671, his Schwanengesang (“Swan Song”), a vast setting of Psalm 119.

He died in Dresden on 6 November 1672, aged eighty-seven, an exceptional age for the time. He is regarded as the greatest German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach, born thirteen years after his death. Schütz united the German Lutheran polyphonic tradition with Italian innovations, always putting the German language and the meaning of biblical texts first. He has been called “the father of German music”.