Music to Accompany a Departure

Reimagining the Requiem
by Thomas May
On February 4, 1636, the funeral services of Prince Heinrich II Posthumus of Reuss took place with musical accompaniment composed by his younger friend (and namesake) Heinrich Schütz. Prince Heinrich, an admired and enlightened ruler during an era of almost unimaginable devastation in Central Europe, had prepared meticulously for his own death.

Nascent Lutheran tradition allowed the personal selection of religious texts for one’s funeral, but the scope of Prince Heinrich’s arrangements was unprecedented. At least a year before his death, he secretly ordered a copper coffin to be made, on which an array of 25 quotations—sourced from the Bible together with various church hymns—was inscribed on all sides, surrounded by exquisite painted decorations. This collection of texts also served as the basis for the Musikalische Exequien that Schütz was commissioned to compose—a sonic “translation” and amplification of the message embodied by this unique sarcophagus and an integral part of the process of saying goodbye.

“Over the last two and a half years, we have experienced the trauma of losing loved ones and oftentimes not being able to be there with them during their last weeks, days, hours. So we saw this piece as a perfect way to explore what it means to say goodbye and what it means to have faith that the departed’s presence will still be with us.” For director Peter Sellars, the goal is “to create a gathering that could acknowledge the passing of so many people from our lives across these last two years” through music that “touches the emotional depth that we’ve denied ourselves.”

A well-educated humanist with a special passion for music—he liked to take part in performances at his court by singing bass—Prince Heinrich had largely managed to keep the ravages of the Thirty Years War at bay from his domain, which was centered around Gera in the heart of Germany. Schütz, born within his sovereignty in nearby Köstritz in 1585, had recently been forced by the chaos of the war to interrupt his longtime position as Kapellmeister in Dresden and to find other courts where he could continue his life as an artist.

Although the Prince commanded only a fraction of Dresden’s resources, his policies brought economic prosperity. He had earlier consulted with Schütz to improve musical life at the court and churches and seems to have developed a close friendship with the composer. Whether the commission for the Musikalische Exequien came directly from Prince Heinrich or from his widow following his death—some accounts contend that the Prince actually heard performances of the music in his final months—Schütz constructed an innovative requiem memorial that remains a landmark of music history.

In his preface to the Exequien, which he published at roughly the midpoint of his career, the composer noted that he had “brought together and set to music in one concerted work” the scriptural quotations and hymn verses engraved all around the Prince’s special coffin. The texts in question, which encompass the Old and New Testaments, convey a theological message of overcoming the bitterness of death through the consolation and hope of the promise of eternal life.

But instead of the cosmic, metaphysical journey of the departed soul mapped out by the Latin Requiem, the carefully culled German texts of the Exequien suggest something more personal and intimate—the assurance of salvation for the departed meant to provide solace to the grieving left behind on earth, in this “vale of tears.” And Schütz has found a way to express this in music that, as described by director Sellars, is “quiet, sober, beautiful, tender, heartfelt, and very modest”—at a far remove from sentimentality as well as from the “histrionics” of our own time.

If that sounds familiar, it may because Brahms achieves something comparable in his early masterpiece A German Requiem, which sets a similarly bespoke juxtaposition of scriptural texts. But Schütz, the most important German predecessor of J.S. Bach, got there more than two centuries before, in a time rent by plague as well as horrific warfare, indelibly marked by tragic losses in his personal life that gave him a very deep understanding of death as a process of living,” according to Sellars.

Conditions had altered drastically since his youthful years, early in the 17th century, when Schütz studied music in Venice with Giovanni Gabrieli. “Imagine how spectacular it must have seemed when he arrived: the 360-degree, immersive sound universe of choruses amid the blazing golds and incredible mosaics of San Marco—music not as presentation, but as immersive,” Sellars observes.

Upon returning to Germany and receiving his appointment to the court in Dresden, Schütz proceeded to combine stylistic currents from Northern Europe with these Italian influences—the latter represented, above all, by the polychoral splendor of Gabrieli, but also the subtle word painting of Monteverdian madrigal.

Aspects of both inform the Musikalische Exequien, albeit on a far more modest scale in comparison with the extravagant resources called for in earlier works of Schütz. He limited himself in this funeral music to a tutti choir scored for six to eight parts (these can have more than one voice to a part), which alternates with varying configurations of soloists. From the ensemble of 24 singers performing as the choir in this even’s performance (three or four on a part), as many as 18 take the solo parts at various points in the piece in order to convey the “sense of communal grieving and also of the sharing of personal stories” that characterizes the work, as Gershon explains.

The Musikalische Exequien comprises three parts, offering a personalized, Protestant alternative to the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. The first, which Schütz calls “Concerto in the Form of a German Funeral Mass,” is several times longer than the other two combined and corresponds to the Kyrie and Gloria movements of the traditional Latin liturgy. “Concerto” is used here in the contemporary Italian sense of a composition for voices accompanied by basso continuo (rendered in all three parts by a portative organ and viola da gamba).

The six-part choir sings the Lutheran equivalent of the Latin rite’s tripartite Kyrie plea, interspersed by settings of Biblical verses for changing groups of soloists. This pattern of alteration continues in the much longer, symmetrically constructed, 16-part section that paraphrases and entirely rewrites the Latin Gloria using verses from contemporary chorales (sung by the choir) and scriptural passages (sung by an ever-changing assortment of soloists).

After this would have followed the sermon. Part Two sets Psalm 73 (which also appears at the center of the Gloria section) in the manner of a motet for double choir: the exchange between each choir is a nod to what Schütz had absorbed from the polychoral style of his mentor Gabrieli during his time at San Marco.

Part Three calls for an especially unusual scoring. A five-part choir sings the Song of Simeon from the Gospel of Luke—a quintessential prayer of peaceful leave-taking—while a trio of soloists responds with other scriptural passages and represents the “blessed soul” of the departed (baritone soloist) being escorted heavenward by two seraphim (soprano soloists). Schütz ingeniously makes use of the performance space to differentiate these musical forces and to suggest “the little group gathered around the coffin, singing to the person inside, being answered by the universe,” says Sellars.

Symbolically, this setup encapsulates the message of the Musikalische Exequien—the term “exequies” deriving from the Latin word for a “train of followers.” In Schütz’s singularly moving dramaturgy, they/we are gathering, learning to accompany a departure. As Sellars puts it: “You feel there’s nobody in that coffin anymore: that being is now in the air and the sunlight and has reentered the universe in every raindrop, in every bud on every tree.”