The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 26 (2020) No. 1

Echoes of Heaven, Echoes of Schütz, and Echoes of the Thirty Years War?
Kreuzkantor Rudolf Mauersberger and his Dresdner Requiem

Torbjørn Skinnemoen Ottersen*

Abstract

This article details how pre-existing narratives concerning Heinrich Schütz and the Thirty Years War could serve as inspiration and be drawn upon following the Allied destruction of Dresden in 1945. The city’s Kreuzkantor, Rudolf Mauersberger, was the prime mover behind many of the new memorials and festivals that were organized during the post-war years. Mauersberger’s own Dresdner Requiem (1947–48, regularly revised until the mid-1960s), commemorating Dresden’s destruction, not only draws upon the polychoral structure of Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien, part 3, but also includes the hymn Jerusalem, du hochgebaute Stadt (1626), written in response to the Thirty Years War.

1. Introduction

2. Kreuzchor, Kreuzkantor, and Schütz

3. Dresdner Requiem: Echoes of Schütz

4. Day of Wrath

5. Echoes of Heaven

6. Echoes of the Thirty Years War?

References

1. Introduction

1.1 Observed by Heinrich Schütz, two women are kneeling in prayer, one quietly with a rosary, the other more loudly: May God not destroy Dresden as he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. With this scene Ricarda Huch closes the second volume of her trilogy on the Thirty Years War, and with this scene Hans Schnoor opens the chapter on Schütz in his 1948 volume on the history of music in Dresden.^[1] Schnoor, however, is quick to disclaim it as a fanciful Romantic invention. But this scene—which, we are reminded, comes after the fateful Battle of Lützen—nevertheless suggests a deeper truth about Schütz, a man deeply cognizant of the finitude and vanity of human life, Schnoor assures us.^[2] Perhaps. But this extensive recounting of a fictional moment speaks of more than just Schütz. For just as—according to Schnoor—Huch’s book is haunted, so is his, by the city itself. For Schnoor’s volume was published in, and devoted to, a city that no longer existed. “A city skyline of perfected harmony has been wiped from the European heavens.… That which constitutes the idea of Dresden can now only be spoken of in the past tense,” lamented Rudolf Sparin in Das Reich on March 4, 1945, in an article entitled “The Death of Dresden.”^[3] “Dresden wiped out” was the laconic headline in the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper that a few weeks earlier had celebrated the city, declaring that “Dresden, with the charm of its streets and the graciousness of its buildings, belongs to Europe.”^[4] The Pathé newsreel, meanwhile, carrying “magnificent bombing shots,” used a more jubilant title: “Dresden bombed to atoms.”^[5]

1.2 It is in this context that this particular sequence—Sodom, Gomorrah, Dresden—acquires particular resonance, as Schnoor well knew.^[6] For Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel laureate in literature, had been staying at a sanatorium outside of Dresden in February 1945. And, as he reported in a widely reprinted and requoted radio speech on March 29, 1945, he (in the words of the Evangelist) “beheld the city, and wept over it”:^[7]

Those who have unlearned how to cry, will learn it afresh on the destruction of Dresden.… I have experienced Dresden’s demise in the hell of Sodom and Gomorrah unleashed by the English and American planes.… I have reached the exit door of my life and am envious of all my late friends of kindred spirit who have been saved from this experience. I am weeping.^[8]

1.3 Hauptmann’s “hell of Sodom and Gomorrah” was the Allied bombing attack on Dresden that began on the evening of February 13, 1945, with the stated intention of “destroy[ing] built-up areas and associated rail and industrial facilities.”^[9] Sebastian Cox offers a vivid description of its effects:

Within the Altstadt the heat from the thousands of fires [caused by the initial wave of Royal Air Force bombers] superheated the air above causing violent up draughts which in turn voraciously sucked oxygen from the surrounding area creating fierce gale-force winds at ground level, which rushed in towards the centre of the inferno carrying more combustible material, as well as hapless individuals, with it. This in turn fueled the maelstrom which raged through the centre consuming all in its path. The heat was so intense that the tar on the streets melted, turning them into molten rivers.… As the firestorm consumed the oxygen in the surrounding area people on the outskirts of the storm found increasing difficulty in breathing, and many … were overcome and simply collapsed. The combustion also produced large quantities of carbon monoxide which replaced the oxygen … and seeped unnoticed into the basement shelters and slowly poisoned those who remained sheltering below the streets.…^[10]

But as he continues: “Much worse was to come,” in the form of a further force of RAF bombers, followed by two daytime attacks by the US Eighth Air Force, the last on February 15. When the bombing and fires finally stopped, Dresden had, in the words of Frederick Taylor, been reduced to a “devastated wilderness.”^[11] According to the detailed study of the recent city-appointed historical commission, up to 25,000 were dead, though reports distributed to the neutral press in the immediate aftermath claimed ten times that.^[12] On the Altmarkt, already filled by the corpses of the hundreds who had sought the illusory safety of its large water reservoir, the survivors relit the fires to begin the task of disposing of the dead.^[13] Above them, amidst the rubble, towered the burnt shell of the city’s Protestant Hauptkirche. “In the endless ruined wasteland, the Kreuzkirche seemed almost undamaged, a dark colossus,” writes Heinrich Magirius.^[14]

1.4 Undamaged it was not, but unlike its Neumarkt sister, the Frauenkirche, whose fabled sandstone dome had collapsed on the morning of February 15, reducing the church to not much more than a heap of stones, the Kreuzkirche presented something that might yet be salvaged.^[15] That task took, in the end, a decade. Shorn of the sinuous extravagance that characterized the church’s pre-war fusion of Baroque and art nouveau, the new bare interior, executed in roughcast, foregrounded the scars of war.^[16] In addition to this visual transformation, the church’s Brauthalle was transformed into a “Schützkapelle,” ready for the Dresdner Kreuzchor’s 1955 Heinrich-Schütz-Tage. The prime mover behind both was Rudolf Mauersberger.^[17]

2. Kreuzchor, Kreuzkantor, and Schütz

2.1 Mauersberger, Kreuzkantor zu Dresden since 1930, had followed, and built on, his predecessor Otto Richter’s increasing emphasis on the works of the sometime Saxon Hofkapellmeister—indeed, his inaugural vespers service was later described as “ein Bekenntnis zu Heinrich Schütz.”^[18] This, of course, can be seen in conjunction with the increasing interest in this “father of German music,” but, as Schnoor’s choice of opening scene suggests, during and after the war Schütz could be a source of inspiration and comfort.^[19] One of the highlights of the 1955 festival was a lecture in the Kreuzkirche by the noted musicologist and Schütz scholar Hans Joachim Moser, whose sizeable monograph, first published in 1936, Mauersberger studied in detail.^[20] Moser chose as the title of his lecture “Heinrich Schütz—eine Lichtgestalt in dunkler Zeit” (“a shining light in a dark time”)—suggestively misremembered by at least one attendee as “in unserer Zeit” (“in our time”).^[21] Praising, like Schnoor, the work of Ricarda Huch, Moser focused rather on the dark days of the Thirty Years War—and on the dark years that followed the Peace of Westphalia for the Dresdner Hofkapelle.^[22]

2.2 Moser’s speech joins a tradition of intimately connecting Schütz with the Thirty Years War, and of connecting both to Germany’s latest war.^[23] By the Second World War the Thirty Years War had been clearly established as the German Urkatastrophe, aided by the rich literature of both eyewitness testimony and fictional accounts. The war retained this status to such a degree that, as Geoff Mortimer relates, in a 1962 survey in Hesse, respondents rated it “the greatest disaster in German history, ahead of both World Wars, the Third Reich and the Black Death.”^[24] Schütz, for writers such as Moser, accomplished the great task of preserving German music through this disaster, paving the way for Bach and Handel, and ensuring that Germany could indeed be “the land of music,” a theme naturally restated and improvised upon for decades after the war, as Günter Grass’s Das Treffen in Telgte (The Meeting at Telgte, 1979) testifies.^[25]

2.3 This “guiding light (Lichtgestalt) of the German people”—in the words of the theologian and musicologist Otto Michaelis^[26]—naturally made his appearance both at the 1955 Heinrich-Schütz-Tage and at the Ninth International Schütz Festival, which took place in Dresden the following year, coinciding with the celebrations of the city’s 750th anniversary. At the latter event attendees were read a greeting from Otto Nuschke, chairman of the (East German) Christian-Democratic Union and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, who—yet again—praised the man who had been a “Lichtgestalt” during “Germany’s darkest years.”^[27] Following a special service in an overfilled Kreuzkirche, Gottfried Noth (Bishop of Saxony), Mauersberger, and Karl Vötterle^[28] led a procession of more than a thousand towards the ruins of the Frauenkirche, the resting place of Schütz’s remains and the central symbol of Dresden’s destruction. There Vötterle laid a wreath before the Kreuzchor sang Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich (SWV 372) from the Geistliche Chormusik, published in the “peace year” 1648, symbolically conjoining Schütz and Dresden, the Thirty Years War and the Second World War.^[29] It was a powerful and symbolic moment—indeed, nine years later it was precisely this performance Berlin Senator Werner Stein decided to recall when greeting the attendees of the Eighteenth International Schütz Festival a few days before the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War.^[30]

2.4 But beyond—or rather, perhaps, before—Schütz the “Lichtgestalt,” savior of German music, there was, as we find not only in Schnoor’s account but also indeed in Moritz Fürstenau’s 1849 documentary history of the Saxon Hofkapelle, the more prosaic story of Schütz’s efforts for the Hofkapelle and its members, as documented through his many letters. Though obviously a foundation for the grander narrative, this was a more prosaic story not only of an institution reduced to the minimum and beyond in membership, but of these members’ lack of money and basic necessities, and Schütz’s begging letters and personal efforts to assist his fellow musicians.^[31] Schütz appears in these letters “less as Master, but more as father [and] protector of the Kapelle,” comforting and supporting the despairing and suffering, according to Fürstenau.^[32]

2.5 The grand tale is obviously part of the background for the proliferating references to Dresden as the “Heinrich-Schütz-Stadt,” complete with a dedicated chapel and an annual festival. But the more prosaic tale must have resonated, too. For Mauersberger and the Kreuzchor had lost much more than just their church. Gone too was the Kreuzschule, the school attended by the choir’s members, and the Alumnat, the boarding house that was home to many of them. And the February Schreckensnacht had dealt a further blow: some eleven members of the choir had perished, several suffocating to death in the school’s bomb shelter, as some more fortunate boys discovered on the morning of February 14.^[33]

2.6 Though, after the fall of Germany, Mauersberger and the Kreuzchor received almost immediate encouragement and support from the Soviet occupying authorities, the Kreuzchor was an institution that had lost its spiritual, academic, and residential homes, and which had been vastly reduced in size by the war. The early post-war period was a story of crisscrossing the countryside, the choir literally singing for its supper—and hopefully some potatoes, coal, and other necessities as well.^[34] And, amidst it all, Schütz was present: in the repertoire the Kreuzchor sang at its hundreds of concerts, and—recalls Magirius, who was eleven when he entered the choir in the fall of 1945—on the wall of the choir’s temporary accommodations in the former Oberschule in the suburb of Plauen.^[35] Even as the miseries of the immediate post-war period passed into memory, Schütz’s experience surely continued to resonate, as Mauersberger found himself dispatching letter after letter to the authorities. In 1951, to mark the 300th anniversary of “Schützens Memorandum,” the Kreuzchor emphasized Schütz’s works in its performances.^[36] 1651 was also the year of several of Schütz’s evocative letters on “the enormous lamenting, misery, and wailing of the entire company of poor, abandoned members of the Kapelle who live in such misery that it could move even a stone in the earth to have pity,” which must have seemed bitterly apposite for a cantor who had recently written his own “memorandum” concerning the Kreuzchor’s dire conditions.^[37] Within this context, then, it is perhaps not surprising that when the Kreuzkantor decided to compose a major work commemorating the Allied bombing, Schütz was an obvious source of inspiration.

3. Dresdner Requiem: Echoes of Schütz

3.1 Mauersberger began work on the piece that would bear the name Dresdner Requiem in 1947, and the work received its premiere in June 1948, subsequently being performed at minimum annually until Mauersberger’s death, and frequently thereafter, most recently in 2019. First bearing the name Liturgisches Requiem, the work is based on the structure of the Catholic Requiem Mass, and can be divided into five sections, as follows:^[38]

I.	Introit (nos. 1–4)
II.	Kyrie (nos. 5–7)
III.	Dies irae (nos. 8–22)
IV.	Sanctus (nos. 23–32)
V.	Agnus Dei (nos. 33–37)

Mauersberger, however, retains only some of the text of the Catholic Mass (almost exclusively in German translation), substituting in many instances biblical centos of his own creation, coupled with excerpts of traditional German hymns. Though this first 1948 version was mostly an a cappella affair, it was nevertheless a grandly conceived one. Mauersberger requires no fewer than three separate choirs, of which the primary one also features soloists and a soloists’ choir. Though the Kreuzkirche would not be ready for use until 1955, Mauersberger nevertheless clearly based his Requiem on the spatial disposition of forces enabled by its architecture. The Kreuzkirche features a large choir balcony above the West door—thus behind the congregation—and here Mauersberger placed his Hauptchor along with its soloists. Within the main body of the church, primarily at the altar, Mauersberger placed a much smaller altar choir. The final choir, in the manuscript of the Erstfassung called the “second choir” but later renamed the Fernchor, Mauersberger hid within the resonant space of the staircase behind the altar.^[39]

3.2 As is routinely noted, this second choir or Fernchor is clearly inspired by the “chorus secundus” introduced by Schütz in the third part of the Musikalische Exequien (SWV 279–81, 1636).^[40] This was a work frequently performed by Mauersberger and the Kreuzchor, and which they incorporated in the annual cycle of musical works marking the days of the church year, in this case at the end of the church year, alongside the “Ecce-Feier” of the Kreuzchor^[41] and a performance of the Deutsches Requiem of Brahms.^[42] In the third part of the Exequien, according to Schütz’s instructions, the “chorus primus” sings the Canticle of Simeon (Nunc Dimittis),^[43] while the “chorus secundus” sings a brief text opening with the familiar words from the Revelation to John:^[44]

1. It is to be noted that this concerto is for two choirs, and each choir has its own text. Chorus primus is in five parts and recites the words of Simeon: “Herr, nun lässest du deinen Diener.” Chorus secundus is in three parts, … and sings the following passage, among others: “Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herrn sterben.” With this invention or Chorus Secundus, the author wishes in some measure to introduce and intimate the joy of the disembodied blessed soul in heaven, in the company of heavenly spirits and holy angels. 2. Primus chorus is to be placed close to the organ, secundus chorus however in the distance, and as it is considered by each to be most desirable.…^[45]

I will return to the third part of his instructions below.

3.3 To elucidate Mauersberger’s uses of his different choirs, I would like to turn to two examples. The first is Mauersberger’s setting of the Epistle, taken from the Revelation to John:

Und ich hörte eine Stimme vom Himmel, die sprach zu mir: Schreibe: Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herrn sterben. Von nun an, spricht der Geist, sollen sie ruhen von ihrer Mühsal, und ihre Werke folgen ihnen nach.

(And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.)^[46]

In Mauersberger’s setting the Hauptchor (TB, in unison) recites the opening words, “And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write.” The invisible Fernchor replies with the heavenly words: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord …,” first the (boy) altos alone, followed by the full choir. While the Fernchor continues singing the heavenly message, the Hauptchor enters to underline the source: “saith the Spirit,” before concluding with an echo of the voice from heaven. With this interaction, the eerie, invisible voice of the Fernchor is suggested as speaking from the beyond, while the Hauptchor functions as a narrator here together with the congregation in the earthly present. It is, of course, hard to miss that the Fernchor repeats, in part, the words of Schütz’s “chorus secundus.”

3.4 My second example, showing the interaction of all three choirs, comes from the opening of the Requiem’s central section, the Dies irae, or, in full, “The Transitory, Death, Dies irae, and Comfort through the Gospel (Christ’s Words at the Altar).” Here the Hauptchor opens with a cento created by Mauersberger from the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon and the Book of Job:^[47]

Es ist ein kurz und mühselig Ding um unser Leben. Und unsers Namens wird mit der Zeit vergessen, daß niemand unsers Tuns gedenken wird. Unser Leben fährt dahin, als wäre eine Wolke dagewesen, und zergeht wie ein Nebel. Also, wer in die Grube hinunterfährt, kommt nicht wieder herauf und kommt nicht wieder in sein Haus, und sein Ort kennet ihn nicht mehr.…

(Our life is short and tedious. And our name shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall have our works in remembrance, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist. So he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more.…)^[48]

Mauersberger here omits the authorial opening from the Wisdom of Solomon, which explains the meaning of the passage: “For the ungodly said, reasoning with themselves, but not aright, Our life is short and tedious ….”^[49] As Michael Kolarcik describes it, the passage exemplifies “the erroneous reasoning of the ungodly …, which the author will refute.”^[50] To this ungodly reasoning the altar choir responds with the words of Jesus from the Gospel of John:

In der Welt habt ihr Angst. Aber seid getrost, ich habe die Welt überwunden.

(In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.)^[51]

This is underlined by the “blessed souls” of the Fernchor, who sing the third stanza of Christus, der ist mein Leben:^[52]

Ich hab’ überwunden
Kreuz, Leid, Angst und Not.
Durch seine heil’gen Wunden
bin ich versöhnt mit Gott.

(I have now overcome,
cross, suff’ring, fear, distress;
through Christ’s redeeming ransom,
God’s love I now confess.)^[53]

This structure is repeated in the next section, where the Hauptchor opens with an extract from Job’s seventh speech;^[54] the altar choir responds with the Gospel,^[55] followed by the Fernchor singing the second stanza of Machs mit mir, Gott, nach deiner Güt.^[56]

3.5 Roughly, then, we can see the Hauptchor, standing as it does behind the congregation, as representing the earthly here and now; to its statements the altar choir responds with the divine promises of Christ, while the hidden Fernchor embodies the part of the blessed souls in heaven.

4. Day of Wrath

4.1 Before continuing with the discussion of the uses of these three choirs, it might be useful to interpose a brief discussion of the Requiem’s depiction of the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath. The two sections I have just discussed precede Mauersberger’s extensive Dies irae proper, which offers a lengthy and detailed vision of the destruction of Dresden, rendered in the language of the Bible and the hymnal. It is also here, in the revised version, that the congregation gets a full sense of Mauersberger’s instrumental additions, as the Hauptchor is joined by an evocative and dramatic orchestra, heavy in brass and percussion:

Brass:	3 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, Tuba
Percussion:	Timpani, Snare drum, Bass drum, Tamtam, Cymbals, Tubular bells, Glockenspiel, Xylophone
Celesta
Organ
Double bass

Mauersberger omits most of the original sequence, but references it twice, first directly and then obliquely. In the first instance, the Hauptchor sings two stanzas of C.C.J. von Bunsen’s German translation to a chorale melody adapted from that of the sequence.^[57] In the second instance, the Hauptchor sings one stanza of Bartholomäus Ringwaldt’s Es ist gewißlich an der Zeit, commonly known as the “German Dies irae.”^[58]

4.2 The bulk of the Dies irae section consists, however, of biblical material, in the form of three centos sung by the Hauptchor and three quotations from the New Testament sung by the altar choir. The third and final Dies irae cento, which is also the longest, offers a remarkably literal description of what befell Dresden in February 1945:

Der Herr hat seine Hand gewendet wider mich. Schrecken hat sich wider mich gekehret. Er hat seinen grimmigen Zorn ausgeschüttet, er hat ein Feuer angesteckt, das auch die Grundfeste verzehret hat. Herr, du hast Menschen lassen über unser Haupt fahren. Dampf ging auf und verzehrend’ Feuer, und die Erde bebte und ward bewegt. Ihre Leichname werden liegen auf den Gassen der großen Stadt. Und ich sah ein fahles Pferd, und der darauf saß, dess’ Name hieß Tod, und die Hölle folgte ihm nach. Und es ward ein Hagel und Feuer mit Blut gemengt und fiel auf die Erde, und der dritte Teil der Bäume verbrannte und alles grüne Gras. Und ich sah und hörte einen Engel fliegen mitten durch den Himmel und sagen mit großer Stimme: Weh, weh, weh denen, die auf Erden wohnen. Es lagen in den Gassen Knaben und Alte. Du hast gewürget am Tage deines Zorns. Du hast mich zur Wüste gemacht, daß ich täglich trauern muß. Die Zwinger stehen kläglich, und die Mauern liegen jämmerlich. Ihre Tore liegen tief in der Erde. Alles Volk seufzt und geht nach Brot. Sie geben ihre Kleinodien für Speise….^[59]

(English translation is embedded in the following description.)

4.3 This extensive subsection begins, following a short instrumental prelude, quietly with the words “The Lord hath turned his hand against me,” before the Hauptchor suddenly launches into a loud and dissonant shout, accompanied by timpani, brass, and double bass: “Terrors are turned upon me. He hath poured out his fierce anger, and hath kindled a fire in Zion, and it hath devoured the foundations thereof.” Brass and timpani then briefly pause, ensuring that the choir’s explanation of the cause, sung forte fortissimo, can undoubtedly be heard: “Lord, thou hast caused men to ride over our heads.” This is followed by a description of the immediate effect: “There went up a smoke, and fire devoured, then earth shook and trembled.”

4.4 A cappella, the choir and a solo boy soprano prophesy pianissimo: “Their dead bodies shall lie in the streets of the great city. And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name was Death, and Hell followed with him.” On “Death” the instruments return, and with them hellish destruction: “And there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of the trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth.”

4.5 Following this apocalyptic extract from the Revelation to John, the choir, a cappella again, turns quietly to the aftermath of the bombing: “The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets. Thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger. Thou hast made me desolate and faint all the day. The rampart and the wall have been made to lament; they languish together. Her gates are sunk into the ground. All her people sigh, they seek bread; they have given their pleasant things for meat.…”

4.6 This extensive summoning forth of visions of judgment and destruction might feel, perhaps, somewhat un-Lutheran. For Luther was vituperative in his critique of the Catholic Mass for the Dead and its emphasis on terrors and judgment. According to Luther, the Resurrection and the divine promise embodied in it should be the focus.^[60] But, we may note, the Hauptchor’s descriptions are repeatedly interrupted by the altar choir, which indeed insists on the divine promises of the Johannine corpus.^[61] And at the end of the final Dies irae cento, discussed above, the Hauptchor finally turns, pianissimo, towards God:

Ich suchte Hilfe bei den Menschen und fand keine. Da gedachte ich, Herr, an deine Barmherzigkeit und wie du allezeit geholfen hast.

(I looked for the succour of men, but there was none. Then thought I upon thy mercy, O Lord, and upon thy acts of old.)^[62]

To this the altar choir responds with the promise of the world to come, from the Revelation to John:

Gott wird abwischen alle Tränen von ihren Augen, und der Tod wird nicht mehr sein, noch Leid noch Geschrei noch Schmerzen wird mehr sein, denn das Erste ist vergangen. Siehe, ich mache alles neu!

(God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. Behold, I make all things new.)^[63]

Again the Fernchor underlines the message with a stanza from a hymn, this time Wohlauf, wohlan, zum letzten Gang.^[64] And thus, through the simple act of turning towards God, the Hauptchor receives the promise of the world to come—and we reach the Requiem’s “religious and musical high point,” the Sanctus.^[65]

5. Echoes of Heaven

5.1 And it is here I would like to turn to the third part of Schütz’s performance instructions for the Musikalische Exequien:

3. Whoever might wish to have this chorus secundus copied out once or twice, and to assign these parts to different locations depending on the circumstances of the church, the author hopes the effect of the work might be greatly augmented.^[66]

Schütz, then, by tripling the “chorus secundus,” could be said to operate with four rather than two choirs.^[67] And, as Varwig notes, the first choir incorporates within itself further echo effects, through the use of dynamic contrasts.^[68] And such a “diffuse interplay of ensembles, echoes and recalls,” Varwig argues, offers an echo or foretaste of the music of Heaven as it was described by Lutheran writers, who theorized at length about Heaven and its endless polyphonic music.^[69]

5.2 She further draws our attention to the sometime Dresden “Capellmeister von Haus aus,” Michael Praetorius, whose method of polychoral “Quempassingen”—described in detail in Musae Sioniae, part 5—Mauersberger introduced in Dresden, and which he incorporated in his own Christvesper der Kruzianer (RMWV 7, 1926–28/1932–36/1963).^[70] In his Urania of 1613 Praetorius argued that “the way of singing per choros is in truth the real heavenly way of making music.” Referencing Isaiah (6:2–3), he writes that the prophet heard “the Heavenly Seraphim in their angelic choir sing the Trisagion, alternately one after the other …; As one called, the other answered, and thus they repeated their Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Zebaoth without pause.” Drawing further on the testimony of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Praetorius argues that this polychoral way of performing music offers a foretaste of Heaven, where “on the one side the choir of blessed people; on the other the Heavenly Cantores, Cherubim and Seraphim stand or hover, and with their shouts of praise and joy in alternation they glorify the Lord.”^[71]

5.3 Though Schütz may, in Varwig’s estimation, have “shied away from a forthright presentation of heavenly music in the Musikalische Exequien,” Mauersberger, in contrast, seems almost to attempt a literal imitation of Praetorius’s image of Heaven’s choirs echoing their Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.^[72] Mauersberger’s Sanctus commences with a brief preface, which is followed by the Sanctus proper and the Benedictus:

In der Gewißheit der göttlichen Verheißung durch Christus erheben wir voll Freude und Dank unsre Herzen zu dir und singen mit dem Chor der Seligen:

Heilig, heilig, heilig ist der Herr Zebaoth! Alle Lande sind seiner Ehre voll.
Hosianna in der Höhe!

Gelobet sei, der da kommt im Namen des Herrn.

(In firm conviction of God’s holy promise through Christ, we raise our hearts to you, full of joy, and with thanks, and sing with the choir of the blessed:^[73]

Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.^[74]
Hosanna in the highest!

Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord.) ^[75]

Following the preface, the Hauptchor launches into a melismatic and forceful Sanctus, which is at first only quietly echoed by the Fernchor, but then, at length, sparks repeated echoes from both the altar choir and Fernchor. This continues with shouts of “Hosianna” and “Hosianna in der Höhe” in rapid alternation. The Benedictus, in striking contrast, is sung quietly by soprano solo and a reduced Hauptchor (“Einzelne”), with partial internal echo effects, before rising into another echoing “Hosianna” (Fernchor and Hauptchor).

5.4 Together with this traditional liturgical text Mauersberger interweaves three stanzas from Johann Matthäus Meyfart’s Jerusalem, du hochgebaute Stadt, a hymn first published in his Tuba novissima (1626), a collection of sermons on the “four last things.”^[76] Meyfart’s hymn concludes the third sermon, on eternal life, in which he paints, at length, a detailed vision of the elect’s reception in the heavenly Jerusalem—a vision that his hymn repeats in concentrated poetic form. Following the second “Hosianna” section the Hauptchor sings, piano, mentioning the land of tears in which they used to be.^[77] This is followed by yet another echoing “Hosianna” section, this time performed by the altar choir and the Fernchor. These recurring “Hosianna” sections, while no “never-ending loop,” do perhaps intimate something of the eternally reconfigured and echoing music of Heaven, where, as the altar choir goes on to sing, “Hosianna” is sung ceaselessly for all eternity.^[78] With the following final stanza, Mauersberger expands the Requiem’s soundscape in Lutheran fashion: the instruments return, and begin a brief prelude, pianissimo, rising to fortissimo as the congregation stands to sing in unison with the Hauptchor. Bells and trumpets resound as, together, congregation and choir sing of the “Jubelklang” in Heaven, where instruments and countless choirs, a hundred thousand voices and more, sing together:

Mit Jubelklang, mit Instrumenten schön, auf Chören ohne Zahl, daß von dem Schall und von dem süßen Ton sich regt der Freudensaal,
	mit hunderttausend Zungen, mit Stimmen noch viel mehr, wie von Anfang gesungen die Himmel und ihr Heer.

(Unnumbered choirs before the Lamb’s high throne there shout the jubilee, with loud resounding peal and sweetest tone, in blissful ecstasy:
	A hundred thousand voices take up the wondrous song; Eternity rejoices God’s praises to prolong.) [79]

5.5 A brief, quiet prayer (soloist and soloists’ choir) leads to the Agnus Dei, set to a melody from Spangenberg’s Kirchengesänge (1545).^[80] Here Mauersberger quietly offers yet another version of heavenly polychoral song, as Hauptchor and Altarchor, dividing the Agnus Dei between themselves, are internally divided between high (SA) and low (TB) voices. Along the lines of the Catholic Absolution, a prayer follows, performed by a soloist and a soloists’ choir, supplemented by the full Hauptchor. These groupings are joined by a faintly echoing Fernchor (pianissimo) for an antiphon that recalls the Introit antiphon. After this contemplative, quietly echoing respite, the Agnus Dei is revealed as something of a structural echo of the Sanctus, as the instruments return, and Hauptchor and congregation again rise to sing together, repeating the divine promise, that to die in Christ is to live again; the final trumpet blast will be heard even in the grave:

Seid getrost und hocherfreut!
Jesus trägt euch, seine Glieder.
Gebt nicht statt der Traurigkeit!
Sterbt ihr, Christus ruft euch wieder,
wann die letzt’ Posaun’ erklingt,
die auch durch die Gräber dringt.

(Then take comfort and rejoice,
for his members Christ will cherish.
Fear not, they will hear his voice;
dying, they will never perish:
for the very grave is stirred
when the trumpet’s blast is heard.) ^[81]

And then, as all three choirs sing the concluding versicle, pianissimo, the church bells begin ringing loudly in jubilation.^[82]

6. Echoes of the Thirty Years War?

6.1 Mauersberger, then, offers the congregation something of a paschal journey from darkness and death to resurrection, as the congregation itself becomes part of the earthly echoes of the eternal music of Heaven. And this polychoral extravagance, from a cantor who so often performed the older composer’s works, may also have offered an echo of the old Dresden master, Heinrich Schütz. Arguably, given the omnipresence of the Thirty Years War in the reception of Schütz, echoes of this historical trauma might perhaps have been perceptible within Mauersberger’s depiction of the latest Dresden trauma on that basis alone. “Schütz’s connection with the Thirty Years War and the associated suffering of the German people probably represented his most valuable asset in becoming a figure of national identification,” writes Varwig.^[83] As she has so elegantly demonstrated, “the same historical facts and narratives” offer “endless possibilities” for elaborating versions of Schütz.^[84] “Schütz and the Thirty Years War” equally offers numerous possible narratives. There is, of course, the Schütz engaged in a “Kampf” for artistic “Lebensraum” in the face of “welsch”^[85] dangers, the first “Führer” of German music.^[86] This Schütz was a “monumental Schütz,” creator of polychoral works suitable for the government’s “monumental festivities,” according to Moser.^[87] And among his polychoral works the Musikalische Exequien were—supposedly—among his most German.^[88]

6.2 This national and monumental Schütz must surely have been present at a grand performance of the Exequien, with the “chorus secundus” tripled, in Dresden in 1943—a year in which the city’s concert life was still very much as rich and active as ever, according to Schnoor.^[89] This performance took place in the “Dom zu Dresden”—a status to which the Frauenkirche had been elevated by Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller in 1934, as something of a reward to Friedrich Coch, Bishop of Saxony 1933–45, for his Gleichschaltung (regimentation) of the Saxon church.^[90] As one of the choirs sang from the dome, listeners might perhaps have been reminded of one of Schütz’s successors as Hofkapellmeister, to whom he was from time compared: Richard Wagner.^[91] One of Wagner’s first tasks as Hofkapellmeister was to compose a work for the Dresden Liedertafel, and he created the polychoral Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (WWV 69, 1843) specifically for the Frauenkirche, hiding one of his choirs high in the dome. Elsewhere this site-specific work may have sunk into oblivion, but not so in Dresden, where the work could be cited as a draft for the ending of Parsifal (WWV 111, 1882).^[92] Moreover, this “Schlußapotheose” was, if we believe Rudolf Gerber, writing in 1934, anticipated by the third part of the Exequien—and, according to Alfred Lorenz, writing a year earlier, this final apotheosis in turn prophesied the German Führer.^[93]

6.3 Thirteen years later the Kreuzchor stood by the ruins of the sometime “Dom” and, after Vötterle had reminded the audience of Schütz’s connection to the Thirty Years War in his opening speech, sang Verleih uns Frieden—an “unforgettable” moment, according to Hans Martin.^[94] As commentators on both the 1956 festival and the preceding year’s Heinrich-Schütz-Tage emphasized, Schütz could be a man of peace, a man against the war, according to Hans Böhm.^[95] If we move backwards in time, it is suggestive that, as Varwig reports, Verleih uns Frieden occurred frequently at the Kreuzchor’s vespers in 1939.^[96] The works of Schütz surely also made their appearance at a Kreuzchor concert in August 1945 in Kötzschenbroda consisting solely of works from the Thirty Years War, in commemoration of the Saxon-Swedish armistice signed there 300 years earlier.^[97]

6.4 But this concert is also evidence that it was not only through Schütz that the Thirty Years War was present. As Mathias Lehmann has shown, the Nazis continuously leveraged the Thirty Years War, all the way to the bitter end.^[98] Speaking on the radio on May 4, 1945, Albert Speer defended Admiral Dönitz’s decision to continue fighting by comparing the destruction that had been wreaked on Germany to that wreaked by the Thirty Years War, and citing the need to avoid a similar “decimation.”^[99] A few months earlier, in a—in retrospect—poignant moment, the Thirty Years War made another appearance in Dresden. In the fall of 1944 Dresden became subject to the strictures of “total war,” which meant an end to most forms of public entertainment. But this did not apply to the Kreuzchor’s vespers, and on February 9, 1945, the choir performed for what would be the last time during the war in the Sophienkirche, concluding the service with Bach’s setting of Paul Gerhardt’s Gib dich zufrieden und sei stille.^[100]

6.5 Gerhardt is of course a popular hymnodist and famous for a number of activities, but the connection between him and the Thirty Years War hardly escaped attention: Franz Hildebrandt, for a series of sermons preached in Cambridge after the outbreak of war in 1939, and distributed by the Church of England Committee for “Non-Aryan Christians” as Theologie für Refugees, took Gerhardt as his theme, with explicit reference to the Thirty Years War.^[101] Mauersberger and the Kreuzchor also responded to the outbreak of war by turning to Gerhardt. At the vespers on September 9, 1939, they performed Johann Christoph Altnickol’s Befiehl du deine Wege, a motet setting of Gerhardt’s hymn, probably written around the end of the Thirty Years War.^[102] Similarly, when the Kreuzchor returned to the Kreuzkirche ruins for a Gedenkvesper on August 4, 1945, both hymns chosen by Mauersberger were again by Gerhardt.^[103] Mauersberger was clearly aware of the connection between Gerhardt and the Thirty Years War: amidst the shorter works he wrote in the wake of the bombing, gathered in the mostly unpublished “Zyklus Dresden,” we find as number 2 a setting of Gerhardt’s Noch dennoch mußt du drum nicht ganz, with the title “Trostgesang from the Thirty Years War” (RMWV 4/2, Easter 1945).^[104]

6.6 And with this in mind we might perhaps return to Jerusalem, du hochgebaute Stadt, the hymn that Mauersberger wove into the Sanctus of his Requiem. Meyfart’s sermons on the “four last things” were, of course, preached, and published, a number of years into the Thirty Years War. The Duchy of Saxe-Coburg had yet to join the warfare, but by 1626 the inhabitants of Coburg had not remained unaffected. After the Battle of White Mountain (1620) Protestant refugees had begun arriving, and as the small duchy had little in the way of defense forces, troops from all sides came marching through, starting in 1622. In 1625 a bad harvest was followed by unseasonable cold weather, leading to a famine, while imperial troops helped themselves to what little food there was.^[105] And, argues Helmut Kornemann, by the time Meyfart preached his sermons, the population of Coburg had heard of the gruesome warfare happening elsewhere—and feared it. Thus, his argument continues, Meyfart’s hymn was clearly a response to the war.^[106] In Meyfart’s own running commentary on the hymn, he speaks of the misery and despair of the current time, and of living “among those who hate peace.”^[107] Meyfart’s hymn thus describes the “wonderful day” that will one day suddenly come, when the soul can finally leave this wicked and war-scathed world. And like many Lutheran writers of this period—as Varwig has noted—Meyfart cannot escape militaristic metaphors in his description of the heavenly Jerusalem, as he concludes by invoking Heaven and its army—suitably accompanied by ringing trumpets and trombones in Mauersberger’s setting.^[108]

6.7 “All the ages of the church should sing with us, and we with them,” Magnus B. Landstad wrote in 1862, setting out the principles for what would become the first Norwegian hymnal.^[109] To sing a traditional hymn means, in many ways, not only joining a synchronic community but also a diachronic one—in the case of Jerusalem, du hochgebaute Stadt one that stretches back to the midst of the Thirty Years War. In his Dresdner Requiem Mauersberger renders the destruction of Dresden through a network of such historical connections, from the words of Luther’s Bible to the physical sounds of the Kreuzkirche itself. So perhaps, then, as Hauptchor and congregation rise to sing with Meyfart about the world to come, we might—as past, present, and future fuse for a moment—be justified in hearing, amidst all the other echoes, an echo too of the Thirty Years War.