Sacred Song of the Middle Baroque

The choral works in this concert represent two distinct approaches to the composition of vocal music in general and sacred music in particular. Though they come from opposing regions of the German-speaking lands—the Catholic southeast versus the Lutheran northwest—their differences have less to do with either religion or geography than with the progression of ideas that swept across Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The older approach is represented by the music of Jacobus Gallus (1550-91), especially in his Mass on Ich stund an einem Morgen. A composer of Slovenian birth, Gallus spent most of his professional life in the service of the Catholic Church in Austria. Writing at the end of the Renaissance, he was able to avail himself of musical ideas that had matured over two centuries, aafting a sophisticated synthesis of Franco-Flemish, German, and Italian styles. Contemporaries admired his music for its beautifully woven counterpoint, sometimes calling him “The Bohemian Palestrina,” a reference to the great Roman composer Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina (1525-94) whose works were considered closest to the Platonic ideal of purity in musical form. Where Gallus actually surpassed Palestrina was in his command of rhythm. His skill in moving back and forth between double and triple meter and in using word accents to enhance rhythmic variety enabled him to create moments of excitement or serenity within the relatively static harmony and dense polyphonic texture characteristic of the style in which he wrote.

Gallus’s mass follows a form especially popular in the late Renaissance. Known as a “parody mass,” it bases the musical setting of the mass text on thematic material borrowed from another piece, such as a motet, or in this case a secular song, thereby also appropriating the mood or “affect” of the original source. This mass, which Gallus based on a song that had been popular in Germany for over a century, is infused with a sense of joy, which Gallus reinforces through the playfulness of his rhythmic inflections.

It is instructive to compare Gallus’s work with that of his compatriot, Hieronymus Bildstein (c1580-c1626), working in the same cultural environment only a generation later. While Bildstein was a skilled master of what was by then already being called then “the old style” (stile antico) or “first practice,” the majority of his surviving work, including the motet Omnes gentes plaudite manibus on this program, shows a decided turn toward a much different approach, influenced by ideas that had taken shape in and around Venice during the late 16th and early 17th century. The Venetians developed what came to be known as the “concertato” style, in which text was broken up into short phrases that were set to contrasting musical figures and tossed back and forth among the different voices of the ensemble. The Venetian approach was part of a much broader movement that arose in the major centers of northern Italy toward the end of the Renaissance. Its proponents were all concerned in various ways with developing a more expressive musical language to amplify the meaning of texts. One of their most important innovations—really a whole group of innovations—was in the music’s harmonic language, breaking free from the relative stasis and tranquillity of earlier practice. Harsh dissonances and the use of semi-tones (sharps and flats) outside the normal diatonic or modal scale were favorite expressive devices. The use of such unexpected notes and harmonies can create moments of great tension or poignancy within the music, heightening its emotional power.

In the works of the other composers on the program—Tunder, Weckmann, Buxtehude and Bruhns—we can see the extension and elaboration of the new, baroque musical ideas. All these composers worked in the Lutheran church establishment of northern Germany. And it was here, ironically, that the Italian innovations seemed to find their greatest acceptance, partly through the agency of early adopters, especially Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) and Michael Prætorius (1571-1621), and partly perhaps because Lutheran doctrine favored music as a way of expressing the meaning of sacred texts (or, as Luther himself had put it, “preaching the Word” through music). It seems likely that the substitution of vernacular German for Latin texts also fostered the search for a more varied and expressive musical language, a trend that was even further reinforced later in the century by the rise of Pietism, a fundamentalist movement which inspired a whole new body of inspirational poetry.

The works of all these later composers are emotionally charged—almost to the point of passionate romanticism in the case of Bruhns’s Erstanden ist der heilige Christ. Even the earliest compositions in this group, Tunder’s Nisi Dominus and Weckmann’s Wenn der Herr die Gefangnen zu Zion, seem extremely text-driven compared to music of the late Renaissance. Where the music seems to have developed most during the course of the 17th century is in the composers’ concept of sectional structure. Where Tunder’s “sections” are based on contrasting settings of extremely short phrases, Buxtehude and Bruhns use entire verses as the basis of their divisions, prefiguring the early “chorale-cantatas” of Bach, and ultimately a structure in which the large-scale sacred work would be divided into a series of discrete movements, each with a different unifying mood.

While the progressive works of these middle baroque Kapellmeisters led to the 18th-century church cantata, it is worth noting that many of their successors continued to adhere to the older polyphonic style when writing masses—perhaps out of a sense of reverence for the “timelessness” of the Latin mass text. Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), for instance—who was considered one of the most forward-looking composers of his age—wrote all of his masses as a cappella, polyphonic works. Gallus himself continued to be respected and his music performed long after his death. Indeed, the music from one of his motets appeared in a work of George Frideric Handel in the late 1730s.

It is also perhaps significant that virtually all of the German baroque composers on this program also had formidable reputations as organists and composers of organ music. It is tempting to speculate that the skill they acquired through this practice—particularly in regard to counterpoint—informed their composition of vocal music. And to the extent that such keyboard virtuosity was typical of the German Kantor-Kapellmeister’s art during the 17th century, it may have been crucial to keeping polyphonic composition relatively strong in Germany compared to the rest of Europe, and thereby laying the groundwork for the great synthesis of harmony and counterpoint that reached its apotheosis in the work of J.S. Bach.