Welcome to this evening’s performance.
SCHUTZ: PSALM 100
Schutz was the first German-speaking composer of international repute and the greatest of his century, with a legacy of some 500 works. Born in the little town of Kostritz, near Leipzig, he studied first at Kassel and then with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice, a fruitful period that came to an end with Gabrieli’s death in 1612. Schutz then spent most of his long life in Dresden, in charge of music at court through the difficult period of the Thirty Years’ War, but maintaining a prolific output of published collection of his work, the majority of it sacred music for Lutheran use.
Psalm 100 for double choir – but which also exists in an earlier version for three choirs – comes from his first collection, the ‘Psalmen Davids‘ of 1619, in which the influence of Venetian polychoral writing is successfully blended with a more square-cut German style of text setting.
The text is Martin Luther’s translation of Psalm 100 and Schutz highlights its jubilant and celebratory nature with melismas on words like ‘joy’ and ‘praise’, a change in meter for the phrase ‘Danket ihm’ (Thank him) and a triumphant homophonic block of sound for the final ‘Amen’.
Translation:
Rejoice in the Lord, all the world! Serve the Lord with joy;
Come before his presence with jubilation. Know that the Lord is God.
He has made us into his people, not we ourselves, and into the sheep of his flock.
Go in through his gates with thanks and into his courts with praise.
Thank him, praise his name. For the Lord is our friend, and his mercy lasts for all time and his truth for ever and ever.
Glory be to the Father and the Son and to the Holy Ghost as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
LASSUS: MUSICA DEI DONUM AND AVE REGINA CAELORUM
Orlando di Lasso (or di Lassus, di Lattre etc, depending on where he was working at the time) was born in modern day Belgium in the 1530s, spent time in Munich, and around many of the great musical centres of Italy.
Music Dei donum optimi (‘Music, gift of the most high God’) has a rich texture of flowing lines among all six vocal parts. It was originally intended to close the last collection of works published in the composer’s lifetime. The text tells of the power of music to soothes souls, raise up sorrowful minds, and even move ‘fearsome wild beasts’!
He set several versions of Ave Regina Caelorum – a Catholic hymn usually said or sung at the close of the office of Compline. When the voices reach the words ‘Salve, radix, salve, porta” Lassus briefly quotes another hymn to Mary – Salve Regina. In this work for 6 voices – in marked contrast from the previous work -we hear the use of homophonic chords, and smaller combinations of voices, which allow the text to shine through.
Translation:
Hail, Queen of heaven, hail Lady of the angels. Hail root and gate from which the Light of the world was born. Rejoice glorious Virgin, fairest of all. Fare thee well, most beautiful, and pray for us to Christ.
Antonio Lotti spent almost his entire working life in his native Venice, first an alto at St Mark’s, before turning to the organ, and eventually holding the post of maestro di cappella. A contemporary of J.S.Bach, many of his best known works hark back to the high Renaissance of earlier composers such as Palestrina. Many will be familiar with his Crucifixus for 8 voices (from the Credo in F minor). This setting of Crucifixus for 10 voices has several echoes of that work, from the repeated ‘Crucifixus’ that gradually introduces the voice parts, to the syballic setting of ‘crucifixus etiam pro nobis’ that follows. It concludes with the long, soaring dissonances that introduces ‘passus et sepultus est’.
Translation:
He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, he suffered and was buried.
RHEINBERGER: MASS IN Eb Op.109
Born in Liechtenstein, Rheinberger – a child prodigy – lived and worked from 1851 in Munich, becoming a much-valued teacher at the conservatory, a church organist, conductor of the Munich Choral Society and composer of a large number of works in many genres. He took a strong interest in the composition and practice of church music and in 1877 was made Kapellmeister to the Munich court, a post once held by Lassus.
Aside from the organ sonatas, Rheinberger’s most famous work is the Mass for double choir in Eb, Op 109, written in 1878 and dedicated to Pope Leo XIII. Rheinberger’s Mass was written in the months immediately following his rejection of the ideals of the Cecilian movement – a conservative movement which set out to reform Roman Catholic music-making in the 19th century. Cecilians attempted to place church music firmly within the liturgy by deliberately suppressing musical individuality in favour of clear declamation of the text and a rejection of all artistic gestures associated with the Enlightenment.
Rheinberger’s double-choir mass – though undeniably dependent on earlier models – exhibits the composer’s new-found freedom and flexibility when writing sacred music.
Right from the opening bars, the antiphonal writing harks back to the late Renaissance splendour of Venice’s cori spezzati (spaced choirs) tradition and the spectres of Bach and Mendelssohn are never far away. However, this music belongs to Rheinberger and shows, to great effect, his gloriously unpredictable powers of invention. At the heart of the Mass are the concise and largely syllabic settings of the long Gloria and Credo texts. Of note are a few moments of brazen word painting (as outlawed by the Cecilian movement) at the words ‘et incarnatus est’, ‘descendit’ and ‘ascendit’ in the Credo. The expansive Kyrie precedes these central movements and the Credo is followed by an ethereal Sanctus, a gently dancing Benedictus and an Agnus Dei whose carefully notated dynamic contrasts and elliptical modulations lead into an extended ‘dona nobis pacem’ section, whose instrumentally conceived textures create a symphonic conclusion to this remarkable piece.
Translations:
- Kyrie: Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy
- Gloria: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will. We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory, Lord God, heavenly King, O God, almighty Father. Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son,
Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us; you take away the sins of the world, receive our prayer; you are seated at the right hand of the Father, have mercy on us. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen. - Credo: I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
- Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest!
- Benedictus: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!
- Agnus Dei: Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, give us peace.
JS BACH: The Six Motets
A German musical dictionary from 1732 defines the word motet partly as “a composition largely ornamented with fugues and imitations.” The motets sung at the Thomaskirche during worship services were taken from a volume that included about 270 works by the great masters of Renaissance polyphony. Thus Bach’s motets were not written for these typical liturgies.
Among his duties as director of music for the city of Leipzig was the composition of music for special civic occasions, such as the funerals of prominent citizens. Though modern musicologists have speculated which specific events inspired these motets, the fact remains that there is no documentary evidence to confirm such theories.
We do know that, on such special occasions, Bach had greater resources at his disposal than for a usual Sunday service. Hence his motets are mostly in eight parts, rather than the standard four parts of his cantatas.
Bach divides the eight voices into two equal choirs. Much of these works’ interest lies in how he treats these two choirs: at turns they combine, separate, echo, contrast, or intertwine. Also, as he could apparently hire more expert musicians for the occasions, the vocal counterpoint is more complex than in his weekly cantatas. Continuo
instruments were also available, typically a small positive organ and a contingent of string or wind instruments such as cello or bassoon.
The popular notion that there are six Bach motets is not entirely reliable; however, these works demonstrate perfectly the range, quality, and variety of Bach’s masterly vocal writing.
KOMM, JESU, KOMM – JS BACH BWV 229 (by 1731/2)
In 1684, Johann Schelle, cantor of the Thomasschule at Leipzig, composed a motet for the funeral of Jakob Thomasius, noted philosopher and rector of the Thomasschule. The text was an extended, eleven-verse poem by local academic Paul Thymich. Schelle’s music is straightforwardly homophonic (all voices moving simultaneously), and, all in all, nothing extraordinary. However, some thirty-five years later, Schelle’s eventual successor, Johann Sebastian Bach, embraced the first and final verses of Thymich’s poem to create one of his most personal works.
While there is no evidence of the precise occasion for which Bach composed his setting of Thymich’s Komm, Jesu, komm, the text and its history indicate that it was probably for a funeral service. This was Bach’s only motet not based on a Biblical text or a traditional chorale. It survives to us today thanks to a single copy made by a student, Christopher Nichelmann, who left the Thomasschule in 1731 or 1732, thereby providing a latest possible date for the work’s composition.
In the first verse of the text, Bach treats each line separately. After a hesitant stammer of “Komm” (“Come”), he immediately employs one of the unifying features of the entire motet: a series of interlocking suspensions, in which one voice sustains a pitch from the previous chord, only belatedly falling into a pitch that fits in the new chord. Bach could hardly have thought of a more apt way to depict how weary (“müde”) life has become. The bitter path of life (“der saure Weg”) is dramatically and dissonantly depicted in a sudden drop of a diminished seventh. For the final two lines of this stanza, the meter shifts to a lilting 6/8, a dancing depiction of the joy that Christ supplies as the right path (“der rechte Weg”). Suspensions abound as Bach tosses the music back and forth between the two choirs.
Bach’s setting of the second stanza is more condensed, as the two choirs combine forces in what is essentially a chorale. It is titled “Aria”, here referring to a contemporary alternate definition of that term as a strophic, homophonic choral work in which the sopranos maintain the melody. Bach generally concluded his larger-scale cantatas with chorales, but few are so harmonically and contrapuntally complex. Once again Bach embellishes the word “Weg” (“path”), extending the text’s final line with a joyful yet subdued optimism in an eternal rest.
Translation:
Come, Jesus, come, my flesh is weary, My strength deserts me more and more, I yearn for Thy peace; Life’s bitter journey is too hard for me. Come, I will give myself to Thee, Thou art the sure Way, The Truth and the Life. Thus I yield myself into Thy hands, And bid the world good night. Soon as my life may end, My soul is prepared. It shall rise up with its Creator, For Jesus is, and remains, The true way to Life.
RHEINBERGER: ABENDLIED
Abendlied is no.3 of ‘Drei geistliche Gesange’, three a cappella sacred pieces published in 1873 and dedicated to a choral society in Berlin. It was originally composed when Rheinberger was just 15. As with Stanford’s ‘Three Motets’, op.38, academic mastery of contrapuntally-influenced voice writing is combined with an authentically personal and Romantic expressiveness, to memorable effect. The text is taken from a passage in St Luke’s Gospel, depicting the disciples pleading with Jesus to stay with them as day turns to evening during the road to Emmaus story. The words are often used in Evensong or Compline services. Abendlied is Rheinberger’s most celebrated sacred piece.
Translation:
Bide with us, for evening shadows darken, and the day will soon be over.