The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 24 (2018) No. 1

Studien zum Stilwandel in der protestantischen Figuralmusik des mittleren 17. Jahrhunderts. By Peter Wollny. Forum Mitteldeutsche Barockmusik 5. Beeskow: Ortus, 2016. [viii, 507 pp. ISBN 978-3-937788-43-2.]

Reviewed by Mary E. Frandsen*

1. Introduction

2. The Middle of the Seventeenth Century as Historical Caesura in Protestant Church Music

3. The Manuscript Sources: Court and City Collections and Inventories, ca. 1650–1680

4. The New Beginning ca. 1640–1655: Venetian Models

5. The Style Change ca. 1655–1670: Influence of the Roman School

6. Appropriations: Parody, Imitation, and Emulation

7. Conclusion

References

1. Introduction

1.1 Over the past three decades, Peter Wollny, director of the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig and editor of the Bach-Jahrbuch, has made major contributions to scholarship on J. S. Bach and his sons. During that time he has also advanced the study of seventeenth-century music, particularly through examinations of music inventories and manuscript collections. In this important new monograph, an expanded revision of his Habilitationsschrift, completed at the University of Leipzig in 2009, he examines the roots and processes of stylistic change in music in Lutheran use from ca. 1630 to ca. 1680. He focuses on music transmitted in manuscript, and combines the study of sources, in both extant collections and inventories, with archival research in order to shed light on the mechanisms by which musical works were disseminated, shared, and copied. He then uses his findings—personal connections between musicians, new biographical information, new chronologies, revised dates of sources, and so on—as the basis for many arguments about provenance, dating, collection development, chronology, and style change. His discussion is rich with examples from numerous unpublished compositions, which he has prepared from manuscript sources.

2. The Middle of the Seventeenth Century as Historical Caesura in Protestant Church Music

2.1 In the opening chapter, Wollny explains that he based his approach upon methods drawn from classical philology and style criticism, and used these to study individual works in manuscript that are in various ways representative of the entire repertory. As he examined the sources, he encountered more and more works composed after ca. 1650 that were modeled upon specific pieces, often by Italian composers; from this he concluded that the practices of reworking (Bearbeitung), parody, imitation, and emulation were alive and well in the seventeenth century.^[1] This realization informs much of his study, including his decision to investigate multiple versions of individual works, and to use these to illustrate “how the consciousness for new style ideals awoke, and how their possibilities were gradually explored” (p. 22).^[2]

2.2 Here Wollny also stresses the importance of musical developments in Italy for the Lutheran repertory of this era, and points to the influence exerted by Venice during the first half of the century, as exemplified by the music of Schütz and by the numerous Venetian works published by Ambrosius Profe in the 1640s. But after ca. 1650, he argues, the center of influence shifted to Rome, as seen in the widespread Lutheran cultivation of the music of Carissimi and other Roman composers, among them Vincenzo Albrici and Giuseppe Peranda (both active at the Dresden court), and the Roman stylistic features that begin to emerge in the works of German composers as a result.

3. The Manuscript Sources: Court and City Collections and Inventories, ca. 1650–1680

3.1 As Wollny points out, most recent studies of seventeenth-century sacred music focus on individual composers; the want of modern editions, and the fact that much of the repertory still awaits evaluation, hampers attempts to conduct broader investigations of overarching trends and developments. As a result, he felt compelled to foreground philological work in his study, in order to identify and select the repertory he would discuss. Here he presents the fruits of his extensive research into manuscript collections, and reveals much about their history and development and the provenance of various sources found within them.^[3] His chapter on this topic is filled with important revelations, only a few of which can be highlighted here.

3.2 Wollny’s study of sources in the Düben collection in S-Uu, for example, allowed him to identify the hands of additional copyists, to expand various manuscript groups, to clarify aspects of the structure of two tablature volumes, and to identify convincingly one of the principal copyists of those volumes. He also unravels the mystery of the word “Assieg” (or “Assig”) that appears on a considerable number of sources: it is the name of the owner of the collection, Johann von Assig und Siegersdorff.

3.3 Wollny also examined the earlier manuscripts in the Grimma collection in D-Dl—those copied prior to the cantorate of Samuel Jacobi, 1680–1721—and was again able to identify a number of copyists’ hands, including that of Tobias Petermann, the cantor of the Fürstenschule (whence the collection stems) from 1669 to 1680. He demonstrates that Petermann copied works of both Germans and Italians, and may have acquired music of Peranda before the composer’s death in 1675.^[4] He also shows that Petermann copied a large-scale setting of Laudate pueri by Rosenmüller and argues that the work must have been acquired before the composer’s return to Germany; in his view, “the piece belongs to the earliest datable evidence of Rosenmüller’s Venetian psalms in Germany” (p. 115).

3.4 Wollny also reevaluated the approximately one hundred manuscripts of the collection of the Erfurt Michaeliskirche, now in D-B, all of which bear copying dates between 1673 and 1683. One of the copyists, Johann Christian Appelmann, was previously known, but Wollny was able to identify a second major copyist, the Michaeliscantor Georg Adam Strecker. By studying the numbering systems used by the two, he also determined that the collection originally held nearly eight hundred works. These were performed at the Michaeliskirche, the official university church, presumably by students from the university.

4. The New Beginning ca. 1640–1655: Venetian Models

4.1 Wollny presents Schütz as the most important exponent of the Italian concerted style in Germany, and argues that his music influenced most of that published there between 1640 and 1655. But he also suggests that despite this influential role, “Schütz’s relationship to the concerto style with basso continuo was somewhat ambivalent” (p. 156), given that he remained wedded to the “ideal of a closed, contrapuntally conceived core” (p. 163) in his compositions. Although the looser contrapuntal style of the sacred concerto, as well as monodic features, do appear in some of his compositions, these “do not displace traditional polyphonic thinking, but simply form a variety of [Schütz’s] individual style” (p. 164).

4.2 Wollny’s view of the importance of counterpoint to Schütz’s compositional ethos is most evident in his discussion of the Symphoniae sacrae 1 (Venice, 1629). Here he parts company with those who have emphasized the stylistic influence that Grandi exerted on many of these works, and points instead to Gabrieli as the fundamental influence on Schütz’s style in this collection. He argues that the composer’s “musical conception of the small-scale sacred concerto” (p. 163) is essentially contrapuntal and is rooted in Gabrieli’s cappella practice, in which the instrumental and vocal parts are integrated into a single contrapuntal fabric. Wollny demonstrates his point convincingly with analyses of well-chosen examples. But one wonders whether this conceptual framework can also accommodate more overtly Grandian works such as O quam tu pulchra es.

4.3 In one of the major sections of the book, Wollny focuses on a portion of Johann Rosenmüller’s output that has received little attention from scholars: the German works transmitted in manuscript. He posits that all of these compositions were composed in Leipzig between ca. 1645 and 1655, before the composer’s abrupt departure from the city, and seeks to demonstrate this by setting out features of Rosenmüller’s style and harmonic language during this decade through discussions of three works. After dating these to 1645, 1649, and 1654 or 1655, he then establishes provisional dates for other compositions through comparison with these three. While the provisional dates that Wollny establishes for the other works seem consonant with their style features, comparisons with representative sacred concertos from the composer’s two volumes of Kernsprüche (1648, 1652–1653) would have been helpful here. These works date from the same period, and could well shed light on the chronology of some of these undated German works, and on the development of Rosenmüller’s style and harmonic language more generally. While Wollny lists the essential features of the Kernsprüche concertos, he discusses none of the individual works with examples.

4.4 Wollny describes Rosenmüller as “the most important and most influential master of the epoch between Schütz and Bach” (p. 166), due largely to his transfer of Venetian models to the German repertory. In this way he “opened new areas of expression to the sacred concerto” (p. 188). Rosenmüller spent some months in Italy in 1645 and 1646, and upon his return, seems to have begun to revise his concerto style with musical features found in works of Grandi and Monteverdi. But despite his fascination with Italian innovations, Wollny argues, Rosenmüller also remained stylistically oriented toward the two later volumes of Schütz’s Symphoniae sacrae (1647 and 1650). Rosenmüller adopted such Venetian features as ciaccona basses, aria-like writing, madrigalisms, and refrain forms, but combined these with German counterpoint; as Wollny illustrates, the composer retained a strong propensity for working out subjects contrapuntally (including in double counterpoint), perhaps due to the influence of Schütz. But Rosenmüller also seems to have moved beyond the Schützian model with respect to harmony; many of the works that Wollny discusses, particularly those that employ ostinato basses, strike one as decidedly “modern” in their harmonic conception; they also project a theatricality that is enhanced by Rosenmüller’s rich and often surprising chord progressions. In his instrumental writing, the figuration patterns and the chains of thirds and sixths also lend his music a more progressive sound. These German works cry out for performances and recordings; they have much to reveal about changes in compositional style and harmonic language in Germany at this time.^[5]

5. The Style Change ca. 1655–1670: Influence of the Roman School

5.1 Here Wollny demonstrates the influence that the music of Vincenzo Albrici exerted upon the works of two Leipzig composers, the organist Werner Fabricius and the Thomascantor Sebastian Knüpfer, already in the early 1660s.^[6] In 1662 Fabricius published a set of “arias, dialogues, and concertos” (Geistliche Arien, Dialogen und Concerten) in which he interpolated strophic poetry into scriptural texts in the manner of the Roman composer and also adopted features of Albrici’s aria style. Wollny also discovered a biographical connection between Albrici and Fabricius, in that the former contributed an epigram to the prefatory materials in Fabricius’s print.^[7] Curiously, however, Wollny does not mine this relationship for what it might suggest about Albrici’s associations with Leipzig composers and the dissemination of his music in the city already in the early 1660s.

5.2 A few years later Knüpfer took up the concerto with aria (or concerto-aria cantata), a genre developed by Albrici in Dresden, and adopted the form as well as many of the stylistic features of Albrici’s works for his own cycle.^[8] Importantly, however, Wollny also observes that while Knüpfer adopted the “tone” of Albrici’s arias, he did not adopt their form (extended bipartite), but instead created aria strophes in which the number of phrases corresponds directly to the number of lines in each stanza. As a result, he argues, these works of Knüpfer “represent the first systematically executed attempt to use the new Roman style in the German cantata, without renouncing some of the essential achievements of the art of the German Lied in the process” (pp. 310–11).

5.3 In a section entitled “the stile antico as a new accomplishment,” Wollny makes an important point about the new ideas regarding stylistic differentiation and categorization that emerged around 1660 in the writings of Scacchi, Bernhard, and Theile. He also draws a connection between the embrace of the small-scale sacred concerto in Germany and the decline of the cultivation of strict counterpoint without continuo bemoaned by both Schütz and Scheidt,^[9] and argues that Schütz’s advocacy of the study of the stile antico in the preface to his Geistliche Chormusik (1648) helped to spur the subsequent interest in such writing among his students Christoph Bernhard and Johann Theile, and among composers such as Sebastian Knüpfer. Palestrina served as an important model for these composers; Bernhard came into contact with the music of Palestrina at the Dresden court in the 1660s, if not earlier;^[10] later, at Schütz’s request, he composed a motet in the Palestrina style for Schütz’s funeral. Theile also seems to have been engaged with the stile antico already in the 1660s, and in 1673 published a set of masses that explore that style.

6. Appropriations: Parody, Imitation, and Emulation

6.1 At the end of his discussion of Rosenmüller, Wollny introduces a topic to which he devotes considerable attention: the question of parody, imitation, and emulation in seventeenth-century German Lutheran music. (Wollny does not use the term “borrowing” here.) In his view, the concept of imitatio was still highly relevant in the seventeenth century, as evidenced by Bernhard’s strong advocacy of the practice in his Tractatus compositionis augmentatus of ca. 1657 and his references to composers (many of them Roman) worthy of imitation in each of his style categories. Wollny notes that while scholars have made frequent mention of these recommendations, they have presumed that students, rather than proven masters, formed Bernhard’s intended audience. As a result, he argues, the role that imitatio played in seventeenth-century composition has been vastly underestimated.

6.2 In his discussions of the topic, which appear over the course of several chapters, Wollny presents groups of two or three pieces, most of which he has discovered, that are related in three essential ways: (1) the second work is an arrangement (Bearbeitung) of the first (the model), created through the addition of parts based on the musical material of the model; (2) the second work is a new composition created by the reworking of motives from the model (traditional parody or imitation technique); (3) the second work is a new piece modeled upon the first, which follows the same pattern of styles and compositional techniques seen in the first work (imitative sections, triple-meter arias, etc.) but is largely or entirely independent of the model, save perhaps for a few direct musical allusions (emulation).

6.3 In the first category, Wollny discusses a straightforward arrangement of Jubilate gaudete, a solo motet by Rigatti to which an unknown musician has added instrumental parts based on Rigatti’s vocal line. Slightly more complex is Rosenmüller’s arrangement of Georg Piscator’s Euge serve bone, in which the Leipzig organist has added violin parts and another continuo part based on the vocal material of his model.^[11] This group also includes Christian Ritter’s arrangement of Albrici’s O amantissime sponse, in which Ritter reduced the vocal scoring from three voices to one, expanded Albrici’s complement of strings, and revised the ending. Most complex are the arrangements of Alessandro Poglietti, who created large-scale works for five or six voices and a complement of instruments from solo motets of Graziani, and artfully used the Roman master’s musical material throughout.^[12]

6.4 Into the second category fall both familiar examples as well as new ones discovered by Wollny. The former include Schütz’s parodies of pieces by Gabrieli, Grandi, and Monteverdi,^[13] as well as Rosenmüller’s Ich hielte mich nicht dafür (Kernsprüche 2, 1652–1653), in which the composer reworked the music of Grandi (his Quasi cedrus exaltata sum), considerably enhancing its contrapuntal complexity. Wollny has also identified two parodies of Rosenmüller’s Christus ist mein Leben, one by Sebastian Knüpfer (his Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist), and another by an anonymous composer, who retained the text and reworked the motives as a motet for double choir.^[14]

6.5 In the third category, emulation, Wollny discusses works that span at least four decades. His first example is Rosenmüller’s Nihil novum sub sole, which is modeled on both Grandi’s Innova Domine and an anonymously transmitted setting of Et ecce nova (S-Uu VMHS 41:8), but which apparently includes no musical borrowing. This group also includes Förster’s Congregantes Philistaei, modeled on a setting of Savioni that Förster quotes briefly at the opening.^[15] Slightly later are works by the Italian Kapellmeisters at the Dresden court, including Albrici’s Hymnum jucunditatis, which emulates Carissimi’s setting, and Peranda’s Dedit abyssus, for which the composer drew inspiration from works by Carissimi and Graziani.^[16] Wollny also identified two emulations of Rosenmüller’s Christus ist mein Leben, both of which form part of the Erfurt collection,^[17] and determined that Johann Philipp Krieger borrowed at least fifteen texts from solo motets of Graziani. Four of Krieger’s settings survive,^[18] and reveal him to have retained Graziani’s formal disposition and frequently his textual divisions and sequence of meters, but to have then “filled the given structure with new content.”^[19] Finally, Wollny discusses Buxtehude’s Canite Jesu nostro (BuxWV 11), with a text borrowed (with alterations) from Graziani’s Canite filiae Sion, and the Lübeck organist’s O dulcis Jesu (BuxWV 83), which closely emulates Graziani’s setting and quotes or alludes to Graziani’s motet at the opening and closing.^[20] Wollny sees the role of Graziani as very significant, and argues that a “new tone” emerges in the music of Buxtehude and his contemporaries around 1670 that is “not at all conceivable” without the “stylistic achievements of the Roman masters around Graziani” (p. 397).

6.6 Wollny neither groups his examples in the fashion described here nor establishes these three categories, but he does generally identify each resulting work as a reworking (Bearbeitung), parody, imitation, or emulation. A minor problem with his discussion of these topics is that he employs the latter three terms somewhat inconsistently. For example, he refers to settings of Hymnum jucunditatis by Carissimi and Albrici as a model and its imitation, even though the two do not share musical material; here “emulation” would seem a more apt descriptor. He also discusses Rosenmüller’s Ich hielte mich nicht dafür, which is based on Grandi’s Quasi cedrus exaltata sum, and describes the procedure as “emulation, which since ancient times was understood as competitive imitation, as a competition between equal rivals in art and literature” (p. 347). But Ich hielte mich would seem to be a product of parody or imitation, as Rosenmüller reworks Grandi’s musical motives to create his concerto. Later, Wollny also uses “emulation” to describe Buxtehude’s O dulcis Jesu; in this case, however, Buxtehude has composed a new work on a text of Graziani, and makes only two direct allusions to the model, both very brief.

7. Conclusion

7.1 As Wollny has revealed, seventeenth-century composers engaged in various types of imitatio much more widely than has ever been recognized. And although he does not draw an explicit connection with Handel, his work sets up a clear context for the later composer’s (in)famous borrowing. Among the many important contributions that Wollny has made with this study, it is perhaps his discovery of these many cases of “engagement with extrinsic models” (p. 397) that is most significant, for it opens up a new area of inquiry, one that has implications for the ways in which scholars think about compositional process, as well as the processes of style and genre development during this era. Thus, Wollny’s plan to pursue this topic with a series of case studies is welcome news; we can await further discoveries from him in the future.