Master & Pupil: Sacred Polychoral Music of Giovanni Gabrieli & Heinrich Schütz

His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts and the King’s Singers

South Bank Early Music Weekend, 16 September 2007

Giovanni Gabrieli (b c.1554-7; d 1612):

Canzon sesta a 7 (Canzoni et sonate, 1615)

Kyrie eleison (Symphoniae sacrae II, 1615)

Deus, Deus meus (Reliquiae sacrorum concentuum, 1615)

Beata es, virgo Maria (Sacrae symphoniae, 1597)

Magnificat (Symphoniae sacrae II, 1615)

Ricercar (MS, n.d.)

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672):

Nicht uns Herr (Psalmen Davids, 1619)

Fili mi Absalon (Symphoniae sacrae I, 1629)

Selig sind die toten (Geistliche Chor-Musik, 1648)

Herr, unser Herrscher (Psalmen Davids, 1619)

By 1609, when the young Heinrich Schütz came to Venice, Giovanni Gabrieli was regarded as something of the ‘grand old man’ of Venetian sacred music. As organist and composer at St Mark’s, his primary duty was to write lavish ceremonial music for voices and instruments in multiple choirs to exploit the antiphonal possibilities afforded by the basilica’s twin organ lofts and other sundry balconies and loggias. The two major collections of Gabrieli’s music published during his own lifetime, the Concerti (1587) and Sacrae symphoniae (1597), became extremely popular, and Gabrieli’s fame and influence spread widely. He was renowned not just in Italy, but also north of the Alps, where many pieces from Sacrae symphoniae were reprinted in Nuremberg in 1598, in an edition by Caspar Hassler, and other pieces were copied and circulated in manuscript. Such was his reputation as a teacher that successions of young composers from the German courts were sent to Venice to serve their apprenticeships with him. Undoubtedly the most famous and influential of these was Schütz, whose period of study in Venice was sponsored by Landgrave Moritz of Hessen, who was eager that Schütz should learn something from this ‘widely famed but rather old musician and composer’ while he was still alive. (Gabrieli was actually in his early fifties in 1609, which by the standards of the time was evidently considered a rather advanced age). Schütz remained in Venice for three years, until shortly after Gabrieli’s death in 1612.

When Schütz returned to Germany he was appointed organist at Moritz’s court, but his skills soon came to the attention of the Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony, who summoned him to Dresden in 1615. It was in Dresden that Schütz published his monumental collection, Psalmen Davids, in 1619. This collection of Psalms in the German vernacular, composed for multiple choirs in the cori spezzati idiom perfected by Gabrieli, is a clear tribute to his teacher, and a testament to the rigorous compositional tutelage Schütz had received in Venice.

Gabrieli and Schütz developed a very warm teacher-pupil relationship, based on mutual admiration, and Gabrieli left Schütz one of his rings at his death. Although Schütz returned to Venice in 1628 in order to study some of the recent developments in Italian music, he never acknowledged anyone other than Gabrieli as his teacher. By this time, though, Gabrieli’s music was considered rather passé in Italy. The seconda prattica had firmly taken root, particularly in Venice, where Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Grandi were in the vanguard of the new style. Schütz was certainly influenced by these new compositional practices, and his Symphoniae sacrae (Venice, 1629), a collection of small-scale pieces for voices, instruments and basso continuo, may be seen as an essay in the stile moderno. However, Schütz’s real genius was in assimilating these new compositional practices and then integrating them with the contrapuntal rigour of the stile antico, and in this he may be regarded as the true heir to the compositional legacy of Giovanni Gabrieli.

© Jamie Savan, Artistic Director HMS&C, 2007