The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 26 (2020) No. 1

Glimpses of War: Schütz, the Dresden Court Chapel, and Geschichte von unten

Joshua Rifkin*

Abstract

The familiar musicological trope “Schütz and the Thirty Years War” conceals as well as reveals. Drawing largely on documentary sources familiar in principle but rarely looked at for their own sake, this contribution aims to broaden the picture outward from the composer himself to the environment against which his story unfolded, and in particular to give those previously seen at best as supporting players a more active place in the narrative.

1. Opening Shots

2. Changing the Angle

3. A Broader View

Acknowledgments

References

1. Opening Shots

1.1 For those engaged with music of the seventeenth century, the words “Thirty Years War” inevitably bring to mind the composer known to most of us as Heinrich Schütz.^[1] And no one with an interest in Schütz will go very long without encountering the war.^[2] Indeed, the association of the war and Schütz has become so deeply entrenched as to make it all but impossible to think of the one without the other. When approaching the subject of the war and music, therefore, we all but inevitably see it through the lens of Schütz’s life and career.

1.2 From one perspective, this certainly makes sense. Schütz, after all, wrote some very great music, not a little of it connected in one way or another to the war.^[3] And the war famously had a deep and sustained impact on him. Among German contemporaries closest in stature, only Samuel Scheidt, in Halle, appears to have suffered comparable travails, living through fourteen years of occupations that cost him a court position and more.^[4] But Scheidt has stayed more or less under the radar, at least in the English-speaking world; his story, too, set in one relatively small German city from start to finish, lacks the drama of Schütz’s high-profile Dresden appointment and his restless travels—Venice in 1628–29, Denmark in 1633–35, Hannover and Hildesheim 1639–41, Denmark again in 1642–44, followed by some months evidently in Braunschweig and Wolfenbüttel; and even a phantom Danish sojourn in the late 1630s recorded as fact by every modern biography until 1980.^[5]

1.3 Schütz left Dresden, as we know, largely to escape deteriorating musical conditions there, which increasingly robbed him of the personnel needed to perform the kind of ambitious large-scale works that he clearly regarded as his true calling—composers then, like choreographers now, did not create in the abstract but shaped their conception in direct contact with living subjects. While his petitions seeking leave for the Italian journey do not make the connection to the war explicit, the account of his life written for his funeral sermon by the senior Dresden court chaplain Martin Geier does:

since at that time the pressures of war were ever on the increase, hampering all that which otherwise tends to flourish in noble peacetime and, equally, doing no little harm to his profession, he resolved to journey abroad once again.…^[6]

Indeed, although Saxony managed to steer clear of direct involvement before 1631, a widespread financial and economic crisis, exacerbated by heavy military expenditures even among courts not yet actively caught up in the fighting, made its constraints felt considerably earlier—as early as mid-June 1625, the members of the electoral chapel had gone without pay since September 1623.^[7] Nor did Schütz remain immune from unpaid salary and consequent debt.^[8]

1.4 Whatever the details of the situation in the 1620s, in February 1633, when invited by the prince-elect of Denmark to direct the music at his forthcoming wedding to a daughter of the elector, Schütz spelled things out directly. Asking permission from the elector, Johann Georg I, for leave on February 9, he observed that he could easily go,

since as things stand there is no great call to put on any elaborate music, not to mention that the company of instrumentalists and singers is now rather weak and diminished … so that it would not be possible anyway to present any music with large forces or multiple choirs.^[9]

Three days earlier, in a letter to the emissary who conveyed the invitation, he put it more bluntly: “at present I am of less than no use here….”^[10] And in 1637, hoping to go back to Denmark, he sounds the same note:

in the present time and with the war still on neither his electoral highness nor his chapel is particularly served with my person, and I am thus, to put it in one word, of almost no use to God or man, and least of all myself….^[11]

Although we have no comparable documents preceding Schütz’s months in Lower Saxony or the Denmark trip of the 1640s, letters written shortly after both periods of leave show the same underlying conditions and reasons obviously in place. On March 7, 1641, the composer likened the seriously shriveled chapel to a patient in his death throes; and on May 21, 1645, returning to Saxony from Copenhagen and Braunschweig, he could write that “the electoral court music in these adverse times has gone completely to ruin….”^[12]

1.5 The war robbed Schütz not only of the performing forces he needed; the disastrous economic climate meant that he also could not find publishers prepared to take on the level of economic risk posed by the large-scale music that he considered his best and most characteristic achievement.^[13] As he wrote in the preface to the first book of Kleine geistliche Konzerte, signed September 29, 1636, the war forestalled the appearance of “some of the musical works that I have composed, which for want of publishers I have hitherto and even now had to withhold, until perhaps the Almighty will most quickly and graciously grant better times.”^[14] And in the preface to the second book, dated June 2, 1639, he apologized for offering the dedicatee “so small and simple a little work,” noting once again how the “wickedness of the present times” made it impossible to bring out the “other and (without boasting) better works that I have at hand….”^[15] With at most glancing exceptions, he never got to publish those “better works.”^[16]

2. Changing the Angle

2.1 The sketch I have drawn here will surprise no one; I’ve even outlined much the same picture myself elsewhere.^[17] But I did so there with a different emphasis from what I now have in mind; for if my earlier account saw things essentially through the lens of what I described as an “almost dogged determination” on Schütz’s part “to pursue his composing in the face of any obstacle,” I should like here to shift the focus—even, to mix metaphors, to turn tables around.^[18]

2.2 As readers will already have observed, the electoral chapel—the institution for which Schütz created so much of his music—forms an inescapable backdrop to any consideration of his life and work, especially during the war years. Yet the chapel has received little sustained attention in its own right. Since Moritz Fürstenau in the nineteenth century, no one has undertaken a dedicated study of its existence in the period of most immediate interest to us.^[19] Mary E. Frandsen has picked up the tail end of the narrative as it involves Schütz in her illuminating work on music at Dresden under Johann Georg II; and Wolfram Steude has offered a concentrated but highly informative look at the chapel in the thirty-five years before Schütz’s appointment in 1615.^[20] But the chapel under Johann Georg I remains a scattershot affair: although not a few documents—some new, some known to Fürstenau but not before run to ground by modern scholarship—have come to light since the Second World War, it remains to pull them together with connecting tissue still unrecovered; even the central trove assembled in the copious archival miscellany known to scholars as the Cantorey-Ordnung awaits systematic investigation.^[21]

2.3 The Cantorey-Ordnung gathers in one thick volume documents of varied sorts—mostly petitions from chapel members and Schütz himself, but also payment orders, chapel lists, even receipts for strings and instruments.^[22] Even a proper edition of this source alone—accurately transcribed and with reference to collateral documents in other Bestände—would constitute a major advance. Fürstenau, of course, already knew it well; the majority of the documents he cited come from it. But he had to proceed selectively; and even there, he made his share of errors, some not inconsequential.^[23] So much of what it has to offer remains uncovered.

2.4 This applies above all to the petitions. These cover, in various levels of density, a span of years running from 1628 almost to Schütz’s retirement from active service in 1656.^[24] Reading them, especially in bulk, brings home a point seemingly obvious, yet easy to overlook: in turning “the Dresden chapel” into an institutional abstraction, we run the risk of forgetting that it consisted of individual personalities, all with their own stories. I cannot tell every one of those stories here; and in truth, they tend to an almost depressing degree to replicate one another. But their very similarity, over the course of so many years, gives them a cumulative weight not easily perceived from an isolated sample or two.^[25] Even the selection that follows—essentially from the Cantorey-Ordnung, but augmented in places with testimony from other sources—coalesces into a sort of embryonic Geschichte von unten, and in so doing gives us access to a dimension of music and the war that we could hardly have achieved any other way.^[26]

2.5 I might set the stage with a few words from the submission of June 1625 mentioned earlier. As the “Capellmeister [and] all singers and instrumentalists” write there, the lack of seven quarters’ pay meant that

we have thereby lost everything, sold or pawned household furniture and goods, lost credit, and incurred great, insuperable debts, so that it has mostly come so far with us that the townspeople with whom we live and board no longer want to house or board us because we cannot keep up with payments or come to suitable terms with them.^[27]

Three years later, as the documents of the Cantorey-Ordnung start to flow, so, too, do the tales of distress.^[28] To take only a sample: On April 6, 1628, the organist Johann Klemm writes that “in these harsh times” he has “not received a single penny of my earned salary in the course of the year, and accordingly hardly know how to support myself and my family.”^[29] On April 21, the bass Johann Kramer, unable to sell or maintain a “small piece of land in the Harz region” left him by parents who “lost their lives in the ruinous effects of the war,” has “no means any more to feed myself and my family”—this, the singer whom Schütz called shortly afterwards the “best in his profession here,” and whom he may well have had in mind even in Venice when composing the great bass solos Fili mi, Absalon (SWV 269) and Attendite, popule meus (SWV 270).^[30] On November 23, the cittern player and former choirboy Johannes Peltz, not long returned from a period of study in Berlin urged on the elector by Schütz, remains without formal appointment and has “neither board money, lodging, clothes, nor anything else”; and on December 22, the entire body of instrumentalists writes to ask for back pay.^[31] In the new year, entreaties come from the instrumentalist and trumpeter Christian Scheffer on January 24; twice from the instrumentalist Friedrich Sultz, the first time without specific date, the second time on July 23; and on August 8, Johannes Peltz still has no appointment and no money.^[32]

2.6 As the 1630s progressed, and Saxony became directly involved in the conflict, things for the musicians became, if anything, worse.^[33] In 1632, Klemm implored the elector to grant him, “a poor servant of now 27 years,” a

partial payment of my already earned and long delayed salary (which amounts to 376 gulden) … either something for now or two thalers per week … so that I and my family can stave off hunger and sustain this miserable life so long as God allows.^[34]

For reasons not yet clear, individual plaints like this drop away in the following years—other than a few submissions from the vice-Kapellmeister Zacharius Hestius, when we next hear from the musicians about unpaid salary, they write as a group, and they continue to do so almost without exception for the rest of the war.^[35] But this hardly means that things got better—quite the contrary, as we see from a widely cited, if long not fully published, petition to the elector near the end of the decade:

Most gracious Lord: Out of the utmost hardship, because of the lack of wood and bread as well as other food needed for the indispensable sustenance of the body, not to mention our urgent debts, we are herewith urgently constrained to implore Your Electoral Highness once again after previous manifold and humble supplications (which we, as God is our witness, would rather have avoided). And even though we have hitherto been turned away every time on the grounds of a lack of money, from which we surmise that Your Electoral Highness regarded as rather high the sum needed to relieve us even slightly, we have found it necessary to apprise Your Serene Highness that if those of us still present, who of 36 persons are now no more than 10, would each be given three months’ worth, the sum would not exceed 600 gulden.

Thus comes to Your Electoral Highness our most humble entreaty, beseeching through God that you will consent, in most gracious consideration that it is, firstly, a small sum, but that for us, who to the increase of God’s glory have most humbly served Your Electoral Highness for so many years, it will provide some succor in this most extreme ruin, to favor us with payment of a quarter’s salary, to merit which we are not only with most humble service, but also with our prayers, at all times both most humble, willing, and dutiful.

Dresden, December 7, 1639
Your Electoral Highness’s most humble musicians^[36]

2.7 To all indications, the reference to ten members in the petition covers only the adult singers and instrumentalists. On March 11, 1640, however, the chief court chaplain, Matthias Hoë von Hoënegg, wrote that “only a single discantist,” or boy soprano, remained at court—and his voice would shortly break anyway; add to this the absence of a “true alto,” and “one can virtually not sing any polyphonic music anymore.”^[37] Meanwhile, the petition of December 1639 appears to have had no more effect than any of its predecessors, individual or collective. What pay musicians got arrived intermittently, and hardly covered the debts they’d incurred. On September 17, 1640, not even twelve months after their last appeal, the entire company again turned to the elector, lamenting “the extreme distress and lack of wood, bread, and other nourishment indispensably needed for the sustenance of the body, and also our urgent debts, by which many of us are subject to scorn and mockery.”^[38] A further supplication, fundamentally the same in content, followed little over a month later, on October 21.^[39] A cease-fire with Sweden in September 1645 brought some improvement in terms of new hires or confirmation of positions already filled on a provisional basis.^[40] But how much difference this made on a day-to-day level would appear open to question—in the spring of 1647 another collective submission sounds the theme of debt more strongly than ever:

although Your Electoral Highness had us paid for four months, we have hardly been able to make use of that for ourselves, as we must give up the greater part to assuage our creditors even some, and … have neither before us nor know of any earnings or enterprise other than our salary, much less to sustain ourselves further.^[41]

2.8 Nor did the end of the war bring any material relief.^[42] On March 22, 1651, almost two and a half years after the Peace of Westphalia, the musicians wrote,

after we have got through this past winter, with grief and distress, with groans and loans, and put off our creditors until the upcoming Holy Easter and Your Electoral Highness’s benevolent payment, we shall not be able to get any further credit unless Your Electoral Highness grants us most gracious help.^[43]

A supplication of May 14 spells things out even more pointedly:

we now, in truth, are living and breathing in such distressed circumstances as ever there were in the most pressing time of war, because we have had to pawn or sell for cheap everything we put together in those times, all our supplies, furniture, and clothing; and now, when we have attained the golden and long desired peace (thanks be to God eternally for it), we have nothing more to hock or sell off.^[44]

To date in the year, they had “not yet received a single penny” of their salary.^[45]

2.9 By mid-August, things had got so bad that the members of the chapel, as Schütz wrote on the 14th, “live in such misery as to move a stone in the earth to pity.”^[46] Five days later, he returned to the subject in a submission to the elector’s privy secretary, Christian Reichbrodt. The musicians had told him that “in four years, as of next October, they have not received more than three quarterly payments, less a half-month.”^[47] He himself had sought to help

these good people up to this very hour, not only by holding out hope for an imminent change for the better but also with advances from the remaining very little that I possess[;]

but even he now had

nothing left, and I can attest in good conscience that of the cash, likewise repayable securities, a portrait, and small cup I still had left, I have already disbursed almost 300 thalers among them, and I never would have thought that their salaries would have been cut off in such a way.^[48]

He called particular attention to the bass singer Georg Keyser, who had written in a petition of August 12,

I now wear such a miserable outfit that it’s unsuitable to go either to church or before anyone, since of the money that was most graciously accorded me some weeks before Easter I could (because of accrued debts of now once more over 20 Ratsthaler, also lack of bedding and food throughout this time) spare nothing to buy clothing or live further from it

—and “no one will lend me a penny.”^[49]

2.10 Schütz underscored Keyser’s plea: “I hear he is living like a sow in a pigsty, has no bedding, sleeps on straw, [and] has already pawned his coat and doublet.”^[50] Almost a year later, on May 28, 1652, he wrote again to Reichbrodt about Keyser: “For want of money the bass recently pawned his clothes again and then stalked about his house just like a beast in the forest.…”^[51]

2.11 The last of the surviving entreaties comes from February 2, 1653—almost thirty years since the musicians first went without pay.^[52] Once again, the chapel members felt compelled to ask for wages because of “our great burden of debt, the near total collapse with everyone of our credit and honest name, which for sustenance of our life we have pawned in great measure, but not been able to redeem up to this hour.”^[53] As late as July 21, 1655, they still hadn’t managed to repay Schütz what they owed him—not until 1658 would the new elector, Johann Georg II, make up the difference for him.^[54] Peace, in other words, did not necessarily bring prosperity.

3. A Broader View

3.1 As the documents just cited make plain, Schütz went to considerable lengths to help the members of the chapel. Indeed, since Fürstenau the literature has regularly, and rightly, emphasized his care and concern for the musicians: “He appears less as master, more as father and protector of the chapel from all sides.”^[55] It does him no dishonor, though, to remember at the same time that he stood, already by virtue of his rank and salary, in a position of privilege and security relative to them. Beyond that, too, he clearly had resources to fall back on. He and his brothers came from a propertied family, whose holdings they and their father could even augment from time to time. Between 1622 and 1635, for example, they owned a portion of an estate near their home town of Weissenfels, for the upkeep of which Schütz lent his father a sum equal or close to his own annual salary; although it ultimately brought them into debt that even its sale did not wholly cover, the very fact that they could engage in transactions of this sort gives some indication of their social and financial status.^[56] However straitened by the chaotic finances of the war-torn court, he commanded assets sufficient to provide his daughters with a trust more than two-and-a-half times the size of his annual salary.^[57] When first asking the elector for leave to go to Denmark in 1633, he emphasized that he could pay his own way; and in any event, if he repeatedly felt it necessary to leave Dresden for circumstances under which he could better continue composing, he did find the refuge to do so.^[58]

3.2 Indeed, even when nominally back from abroad, he by no means stayed continually at court, retreating increasingly to his home town of Weissenfels, a good 150 kilometers from Dresden—we find him there or not far away in late winter and early spring 1638–39; in spring and summer 1641; with at most short interruptions from autumn 1645 until spring 1647; again in 1648 until summer 1649; and similarly in the early 1650s, as he sought increasingly to withdraw from active duty and gain the retirement not granted to him until 1656.^[59] Small wonder then, that on May 16, 1649, during one of these absences, a disgruntled member of the chapel could write,

it would do Kapellmeister Schütz credit and honor if, as membrum principale and head of the chapel, he remained steadily with the chapel, provided it with musical works, stood by it immutably in word and deed, and thus did things as his office demands; but it is well known to both Your Electoral Highness and everyone that he, other than as befits a shepherd, has for many years paid little notice to his flock, forsaken it while traveling from one province to another … [and] has now once again sat for a year in Weissenfels, concerning himself with the chapel hardly or not at all.^[60]

3.3 By the same token, if economic constraints meant that much of Schütz’s “better works” had to go unpublished, he nevertheless managed to disseminate a considerable amount in manuscript—even if many of those pieces have not subsequently withstood the ravages of time.^[61] Of the works he did bring to press, moreover, from 1639 onward he could supply the paper for them—the most expensive item in the printing process—with a personal stock bearing his own emblem as watermark.^[62] Nor, except perhaps when traveling from one place to another, does he appear to have faced actual danger.^[63] Even at the height of the war, Dresden escaped invasion, siege, or occupation; Schütz remained spared a fate like that suffered in Zeitz by his “highly honored friend” Joseph Avenarius, whom invading Swedish troops bent on robbing him tortured by head tourniquet and thumbscrew, all graphically described in a contemporary account that I’ll refrain from quoting here.^[64]

3.4 Of course, the chapel members also remained out of physical peril so long as they did not leave Dresden. Nor might their pleas of poverty always tell the whole story. Klemm, for instance, managed to subsidize the publication of his Partitura seu tabulatura italica in 1631, and a now lost volume of sacred German madrigals for four to six voices two years earlier; towards the end of the war, he served as sole or co-publisher of Schütz’s Symphoniae sacrae, part 2, in 1647 and Geistliche Chormusik in 1648—which under normal circumstances would have entailed a financial commitment.^[65] If, moreover, Schütz did not suffer in quite the same ways, or to quite the same degree, as the musicians did, he certainly suffered enough—and not only artistically and financially, but also in his most intimate circumstances: He lost his next-youngest brother, Georg, in September 1637, his elder daughter, Anna Justina, early the following year; he possibly had to abandon his hopes of going to Denmark because of the need to take care of his surviving daughter, Euphrosyna, and of Georg Schütz’s eldest sons after the destruction of their school—another consequence of the war.^[66] And of course, the class of individuals above him at court—from his immediate superior, the court chaplain Hoë von Hoënegg, on up to the elector himself—could presumably weather the storms much better than any of those in lower positions.

3.5 In any event, we cannot really indulge in relative suffering or privilege. Nor, in that same vein, can we forget that the troubles faced by Schütz and the members of his chapel hardly remained confined to them. Even our few glances outside Dresden other than those directly connected with Schütz’s travel—Scheidt in Halle, Johann Kramer’s plot of land, the torture of Johann Avenarius, property and schools laid to waste—remind us of the dangerous world beyond the relatively small and protected bubble in which our protagonists’ lives unfolded. Within Dresden, for that matter, they hardly led a hermetically sealed existence. If everyone lived on credit, then their creditors themselves must have fallen repeatedly into arrears, making credit all the harder to come by as no one had the means to pay off initial debts; and so trouble both expanded and circled back on itself. No matter where we look, then, the war caught everyone and everything in its web; and as we continue to investigate and think about this dreadful time, we need to pay attention not only to personal stories, but also to the structural features that impinged on, and so shaped, those stories. Naturally, as musicians and historians, we will keep coming back to the music. But restoring it back into the thick entanglements that enabled, hindered, stimulated, and blocked its production and reception can only enrich our apprehension and appreciation of it.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Victor Coelho for urging me to write this essay and for conceiving of the conference whose proceedings follow; to Keith Polk for many illuminating discussions along the way; to Walter Werbeck and Beate Agnes Schmidt for stimulating exchanges and for alerting me to literature I might otherwise have overlooked; and to Lois Rosow for getting me some hard-to-find references at the last minute. They say that the history through which one lives determines the history one writes. Completing this text in the time of the novel coronavirus, I can certainly attest to that.