Der Herr sprach zu meinem Herren...

As many of you may be aware, my family enjoys and seeks out the uplifting influence of the Fine Arts for their highly cultivated ability to carry and effectively communicate weighty themes. Musically, this means that we favor what is referred to as “Classical Music.”

Three weeks ago, I featured a collection from our favorite choir: Dresdner Keuzchor: Legendary recordings. Most of the recordings in that collection are Sacred choral works from the Late Renaissance and Early Baroque periods, by Lutheran composers like Heinrich Schütz, Johann Schein, Samuel Scheidt, Johann Sebastian Bach and even Martin Luther. More importantly, seven of the ten disks in this collection were filled with recordings of music that was composed for use in the context of Lutheran Worship, and were recorded by a choir that regularly sings them in the context of worship. I also posted definitions of the various periods in Classical Music. If you are unfamiliar with these periods, a review may be helpful.

Anyway, this week, I am returning to one of the composers featured in that collection: Heinrich Schütz.

Heinrich Schütz was a very important early-Baroque composer, and is considered to be the greatest German composer second to Johann Sebastian Bach. But I'll bet you have never heard of him. How can it be that a composer of such stature – second in line to Bach, and one whom Bach himself looked to for inspiration – is generally unknown? Why is it that the average American is denied popular access to his works, not to mention his name, either on the radio or in the schools – or at the local music store! – and is instead left to stumble upon this compositional goldmine on his own?

As he quickly became (and has remained) our favorite composer, Mrs. Finkelstein and I wondered about this when we stumbled upon him shortly after our wedding; having also just become bona fide Lutherans, we were searching for wholesome Lutheran music with which to fill our minds and our home. The answer: Heinrich Schütz composed almost exclusively for the Lutheran Church in Germany (and Denmark) during the Lutheran Age of Orthodoxy. Except for a single collection of Renaissance madrigals, nothing of his can be played or discussed without also confronting the listener with overt Christianity. So paranoid and suspicious of Christianity has society become, that even the influential high-art of Christians from the pinnacle of Western Civilization is censured. If it were not for the "super-novas" of the Fine Arts, who simply cannot be ignored – i.e., Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Raphael, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Cranach, Dürer, and even Rembrandt – Christian art would be shunted aside and forgotten. And how many pop-art-dependent Christians today would be all the happier for it!

Heinrich Schütz studied at St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice under none other than Giovanni Gabrieli, who, along with his father Andreas, was of prime influence in the development of western music following the Renaissance, particularly in the development of antiphonal and polychoral music. This was the influence that Schütz brought back to Germany and upper Europe, and which he masterfully wedded with the German language, the purest manifestation of which, for him, was Martin Luther's translation of the the Bible.

Heinrich Schütz's Psalmen Davids, the collection featured above, was published collectively in 1619, six years after completing his studies with Gabrieli. It is the finest example of Italian influenced polychoral composition produced by him, and was instrumental in the development and refinement of German compositions moving into the Baroque period. Dresdner Keuzchor: Legendary recordings, the collection I featured three weeks ago, included one full disk devoted to the Psalmen Davids, but this single disk does not contain the full cycle of Psalms from Schütz's published collection. Rather, the recording pictured above, conducted by Frieder Bernius, and performed by the Kammerchor Stuttgart and Musica Fiata Köln, is the only complete collection of all 26 Psalms available. Performed by experts in early music, the execution is full, precise and envigorating. If one has not heard Schütz's Psalmen Davids, they may well wonder if they know what catholicity sounds like! This is music for the Church – BIG and Deep.