VITRIOL

Schütz

Messiaen

Albright

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672)
Geistliche Chor-Music

The turn of the seventeenth century was the golden age of alchemical tinkering, and many curious and bizarre mystical thinkers surrounded the composer Heinrich Schütz. His first patron, Landgrave Moritz of Kassel, sponsored such illustrious alchemists as Michael Maier (Atalanta fugiens), Johann Velentin Andreae (Chymische Hochzeit), and Oswald Crall (Basilica Chymica). Later, in Dresden, Schütz crossed paths with the great mystic Jacob Böhme, whose understanding of the cosmic struggle between positive and negative forces resulting in eternal regeneration influenced generations of intellectuals throughout Europe, including Blake, Hegel, Goethe, Marx, and Nietzsche. No wonder, then, that Schütz turned to exotic biblical texts and obscure religious poetry with mystical undertones for many of his compositions.

Three of Schütz's motets from Geistliche Chor-Music focus particularly on transformational power. In these texts, Christ is the catalyst that effects inter-personal transfiguration, the key that opens a new realm of consciousness, and the liquid philter that when imbibed changes the material nature of initiates.

20. Das ist je gewisslich wahr (SWV 388)

On his deathbed, the composer Johann Hermann Schein requested that his friend Schütz set I Timothy 1:15-17 to music. Schein was thirty-eight when he died on 19 November 1630. The following January, Schütz published Das ist je gewisslich wahr, SWV 277, for six voices. Later, Schütz refined the closing doxology and in 1648 he republished the motet in his collection Geistliche Chor-Music.

In St. Paul's poetic text, Christ was the catalyst that transformed the nature of humans from evil to good. Through St. Paul's conversion, the self-proclaimed foremost of all sinners became the exemplar of the saved. St. Paul thereby transcended good and evil and became a catalyzing agent able to transform others.

Das ist je gewisslich wahr und ein teuer wertes Wort, dass Christus Jesus kommen ist in die Welt, die Sünder selig zu machen, unter welchen ich der fürnehmste bin. Aber darum ist mir Barmherzigkeit widerfahren, auf dass an mirfürnehmlich Jesus Christus erzeigete alle Geduld zum Exempel denen, die an ihn gläuben sollten zum ewigen Leben. Gott, dem ewigen Könige, dem unvergänglichen und unsichtbaren und allein Weisen, sei Ehre und Preis in Ewigkeit, Amen.

Here is a saying that you can rely on and nobody should doubt: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and I am the first of sinners. But mercy has been shown to me because Jesus Christ meant to make me the leading example of his inexhaustible patience for all the other people, who were later to trust in him for eternal life. To God, the eternal king, the undying, invisible and only God, be honor and glory forever. Amen.

11. So fahr ich hin zu Jesu Christ (SWV 379)

This five-voice setting of the fifth and final stanza of Nikolaus Hermann's 1575 hymn Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist displays the refined mastery of Schütz's tone painting. The opening musical figure, with the simultaneous stepwise ascent and descent of two voices, demonstrates the Baroque musical-rhetorical device fuga inversa. With this technique, Schütz encapsulated the spiritual paradox that the descent into death was simultaneous with the ascent to the afterlife. As with Das ist je gewisslich wahr, Christ was the transformational element that awakened humans from the sleep of death and unlocked the gates of eternity.

So fahr ich hin zu Jesu Christ,
mein Arm tu ich ausstrecken,
so schlaf ich ein und ruhe fein,
kein Mensch kann mich aufwecken,
denn Jesus Christus, Gottes Sohn,
der wird die Himmelstür auftun,
mich führen zum ewigen Leben.

Thus I go hence to Jesus Christ,
I stretch out my arm,
thus I fall asleep and rest soundly,
no one can wake me
except for Jesus Christ, son of God,
who will open the gate of heaven
and lead me to eternal life.

Hearts21. Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock (SWV 389)

Schütz's six-voice setting of John 15:1-5 vividly depicts the metaphor of the initiate as a branch on Christ's vine. For Schütz, this allegory deepened when initiates consumed the fruit of the vine--the transformational element of wine--in the Christian sacrament of Eucharist. The Eucharist was doubly transformational: upon intoning sacred words a priest changed the wine into Christ's blood, and upon ingesting the transformed substance the initiate was changed from evil to good.

In the opening section of the motet, increasing numbers of voices seamlessly enter as if tracing the outline of a vast tree. For the words "wird er reinigen," Schütz paradoxically uses tripla, a technique he generally reserved for joyous poetry, to portray good that springs from adversity. With the repeat of the text "Ich bin der Weinstock," the opening motive returns, but with the words "ihr seid die Reben" new musical tendrils spiral and creep betwixt the voices. The motet's final section binds together two motives, one for Christ's line "also auch ihr nicht" and the other for the invitation "ihr bleibet denn in mir," in such close imitation that a sense of tactus--time itself--is lost. Thus, eternity can be gained only in combinatorial symbiosis between the individual and the divine.

Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock, mein Vater ein Weingärtner. Eine jegliche Reben an mir, der nicht Frucht bringet, wird er wegnehmen, und einen jeglichen, die da Frucht bringet, wird er reinigen, dass er mehr Frucht bringe. Ich bin der Weinstock, ihr seid die Reben, bleibet in mir und ich in euch. Gleich wie der Reben kann keine Frucht bringen von ihm selber, er bleibe denn am Weinstock, also auch ihr nicht, ihr bleibet denn in mir.

I am the true vine, and my father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts away, and every branch that does bear fruit he purifies to make it bear even more. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me, as I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself, unless it remains part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.