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Home , Barbara Strozzi, Chorale concerto, Concerto delle donne, Johann Hermann Schein, John Blow, Lutheran chorale

Chapter 8: Travels: Trends in Italy, Germany, France, and England

I. Introduction A. During the seventeenth century, instrumental music rose in prominence and respect. B. Different political climates in Italy, France, Germany, and England resulted in national musical styles.

II. Instrumental Music A. Some Organists: Frescobaldi, Sweelinck, and Others 1. Formal plans that did not depend on a text allowed instrumental music to expand to substantial compositions. 2. Written examples demonstrated what a virtuoso performer could do in improvisation. a. The music of the organist at St. Peter’s, , (1583– 1643) is a good example of how this works. 1) He was a flamboyant whose music illustrates that early seventeenth-century musicians performed in an almost excessively impressive style. 2) Twelve of his sixteen published volumes are of instrumental music. 3) Two genres associated with him are the toccata and partite. a) Toccatas turn the act of playing into a form of theater, thereby linking them to current trends in vocal music. b) Frescobaldi’s toccatas are sectional and can be ended where need be. 4) His partite, or variations, were inventive works that evince years of improvisation. a) They include examples of the and ciaccona. b. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621), a Dutch organist, was another famous composer, chiefly known for improvisation. 1) He published old-fashioned vocal music but also performed in a modern style on the keyboard. 2) English Catholic who moved to the Netherlands introduced Sweelinck to the music of the virginalists (English keyboard composers), including Byrd.

B. Lutheran Adaptations: The Partita and Chorale 1. Sweelinck taught a number of Germans, and his interest in variations carried through to them, especially in the genre known as chorale variations. a. The melody of the chorale is present throughout but moves into different voices. b. Polyphonic treatment was one possibility, which became recognized as a genre called chorale partita. 1) Sweelinck’s pupil was an early practitioner of the chorale partita. a) He published a version of Christ lag in Todesbanden in 1624 in his Tabulatura nova—“New Tablature.” b) Each variation in Anthology 1-70 demonstrates a different variation technique.

2. The concerto was a vocal counterpart to the chorale partita that mixed instruments with voices. Two proponents were (1571–1621) and (1586–1630). They reveal a fascination with the new Italian music. a. Schein was a civil servant who wrote sacred and secular music. 1) His Banchetto musicale (1617) was a book of dances organized into groups that are eventually called suites. 2) Schein’s prefaces to publications indicate he was interested in new styles. 3) In his setting of Christ lag in Todesbanden, the fact that one could replace the two solo singers with instrumentalists reveals that Schein conceived of lines, not as specific responses to the text. b. Praetorius also composed pieces for voices and instruments together, as well as instrumental ensemble music and five treatises.

III. Italian Music in Germany A. Ruin: Germany, the Thirty Years War, and Heinrich Schütz 1. The Thirty Years War severely weakened Germany as a power. These caused necessary adaptations to the courtly arts, most clearly seen in the career and compositions of Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672). a. Recognized early as an exceptional singer, Schütz received musical training in Kassel. b. In 1609, the man who had discovered Schütz’s talent enabled the composer to travel to Italy to study with . 1) The trip to Italy allowed Schütz to learn to compose in the new Italian style, which was his life’s dream. 2) The turmoils of state, however, prevented him from writing in a purely Italian style, but he managed to combine aspects with great success. a) A new appointment in , a reigning musical center, at first allowed him to use large forces. (1) Schütz’s Psalmen Davids show how he was able to write for large forces with antiphonal choruses. (2) He wrote an , Daphne, to a German text (the first). b) With war demanding pared-down forces, Schütz composed his Cantiones sacrae and Geistliche ChorMusic for smaller groups, some bordering on austere.

B. The “Luxuriant Style” 1. While he was still in Italy, Schütz composed fifteen sacred , Symphoniae sacrae (1629), as a tribute to Gabrieli. 2. One of his pupils described a “luxuriant style,” which can be seen as an aspect of rhetoric through ornamenting musical speech. a. The style of one of the Symphoniae sacrae, O quam tu pulchra es, exhibits characteristics of the “luxuriant style.” b. The refrain, with its dissonant fourth, acts both as formal unifier and as a reinforced message of desire.

C. Back to Germany at War

1. After a second trip to Italy, Schütz returned to war-torn Germany. 2. With many of his musicians drafted in the army and budgets thinned, he turned to a leaner style, seen in his Kleine geistliche Concerte. a. These works needed far fewer performers. b. The mood was somber and mournfully subjective. c. The sound is sometimes harsh and painful, which some scholars attribute to a German aesthetic. 3. With the peace treaty signed in 1648, Schütz’s patron (Elector Johann Georg) became one of the most powerful Protestant princes in Germany, and as a consequence Schütz’s fortunes improved. a. The works from this period are in German. b. The Geistliche ChorMusic (1648) requires a full chorus, not soloists. c. The third book of Symphoniae sacrae demonstrates how the composer combined elements of his Italian training with the musical asceticism demanded by the wars (German aesthetic). 1) Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? illustrates this combination of styles. d. His Historien (oratorios) are his largest surviving works.

IV. Italian Music A. Carissimi: Oratorio and 1. The chief Italian composer of oratorios during Schütz’s lifetime was (1605–74); he worked in Rome. 2. Carissimi taught many foreigners, including Christoph Bernhard and Marc-Antoine Charpentier. 3. Jepthe is Carissimi’s most famous oratorio. a. It combines madrigalisms with stile antico polyphony. b. In the final laments, the part of narrator shifts around to various singers. Carissimi also worked for Queen Christina of Sweden, who lived in Rome after her abdication in favor of Catholicism. 4. The cantata was the solo successor to the . a. eventually came to mix different types of pieces together. b. The quasi-formal structure of alternating with came into being in Rome. c. The recit/ sequence became standard in all dramatic genres, especially opera. d. Conventional opera types are found in cantatas as well.

B. : Performer and Composer 1. The genre of cantata spread to northern Italian cities, such as Bologna and . 2. In Venice Barbara Strozzi (1619–66), a composer who had studied with the opera composer Cavalli, published eight books of , cantatas, and arias. a. That she was able to publish so much as a woman testifies to her reputation as a noteworthy composer. b. Her Lagrime mie is an exemplary cantata. 1) Written from the male perspective, but in the of a 2) Harsh dissonances give aural perspective to the singer’s pain

3) The final stanza has a recit/aria pairing 3. Special conditions allowed some women throughout music history to pursue careers as composers, but these are mostly the exceptions. a. Careers as singers opened to women in the late sixteenth century (women were not customarily allowed to sing in sacred establishments). 1) was one arena for women singers. 2) Opera roles were another. b. Women who performed on stage were often associated with prostitutes. 4. Several women composed in during the sixteenth century, but only Maddalena Casulana published (three books of madrigals, 1568–83). 5. Slightly later, women such as Strozzi and published works in Italian. a. When Caccini married, she published anonymously. She also outranked her father socially. b. She wouldn’t allow her daughter to sing publicly.

V. French Music A. The French Taste: Sense and Sensuousness 1. Musical style in the seventeenth century differed substantially in France from that in Italy. 2. The French determined quality in terms of “taste.” Royal authority determined royal taste, which governed all. 3. Opera took a while to become accepted in France, in part due to a tradition of fine spoken drama. The dramma per musica seemed silly and excessive.

B. Tragédie Lyrique: The Politics of Patronage 1. The first officially presented in France were performed by Italian musicians who were loyal to Cardinal Jules Mazarin—a masterful politician who was also Italian. 2. French opera was bound to French politics, which evolved around Louis XIV. a. All operas had to be previewed in court. b. The values of spoken drama had to be preserved in opera, which was called a tragédie en musique, later tragédie lyrique. 3. The most important composer of French opera was the Italian Jean Baptiste Lully. a. Lully essentially held a monopoly on French opera. b. With his royal support, Lully defined an art form—and ultimately a national identity.

C. Drama as Court Ritual 1. Lully’s tragédie lyrique was an outward expression of the grandeur and authority of the State. a. The king sometimes chose the plot, but they all worked toward the same end: universal order and the divine right of rulers. b. Sacrifice is an important theme. 2. The opening ouverture sets the tone with majestic dotted rhythms, followed by a section in a different meter that is polyphonic (and imitative). This is called a French overture and was invented by Cambert (another opera composer).

a. It introduces a prologue that acknowledges royalty that lasts an entire act. b. It includes choral pageantry and suites of dances. 1) The king himself took part in these dances. c. Ceremonial music was accompanied by les vingt-quatre violons du Roi, which was the best orchestra in Europe. 1) The scoring was typically for five parts, and the orchestra was sometimes enlarged to include winds. 3. The culmination of the opera took place in a (or passacaille), a stately dance over a ground bass. 4. The lead singers in tragédie lyrique were typically actors, not professional singers like castrati, because of the French audience’s disdain for virtuoso singing.

D. Atys, the King’s Opera 1. The subject of Atys relates a love triangle, and recent research suggests it mirrored an actual situation at court involving the king, the queen, and the future queen. 2. The soliloquy beginning the third act illustrates Lully’s adherence to speech patterns, eschewing elaborate vocal display. 3. Dance remains an important element. The middle of this act contains a famous sleep scene, based on dance-like phrases, which moves from pleasant and dreamy to scary. The orchestra and chorus paint a picture of a nightmare. 4. French singers sang against a —not the whole orchestra. a. The sparse accompaniment allowed for the lofty expression of the text. b. Singers did add small ornaments to enhance the music.

E. Jean-Philippe Rameau 1. The operas of Lully’s greatest successor, Rameau (1683–1764), followed many aspects of the older composer’s works. a. Mythology still served to illuminate current events. b. Virtuoso singing was rare but not completely absent. 1) In Castor et Pollux (1737), elements of Italian style enter. 2. Rameau’s style is not drastically different from that of Lully, simply more of each element: richer harmony, sumptuous sonority, thicker texture, rhythmically and rhetorically more heroic, and a mastermind of genre. 3. Rameau’s complexity was not welcomed by all Frenchmen, and tensions arose in the press on each side (Lully vs. Rameau). 4. Nonetheless, Rameau was seen as Lully’s successor and the primary composer of French operatic style. 5. Later in the century, the Querelle des Bouffons caused debate over the suitability of Italian opera in France, and which style was better. a. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau got involved in this debate.

VI. England A. Jacobean England: and Consort Music 1. Like the French, English audiences preferred spoken drama to Italian opera. 2. They also disliked virtuoso vocal display. 3. The chief theatrical entertainment of the Jacobean period was the .

a. Arranged around mythological plots, these praised the ruler or patron. b. Ben Jonson was the first British poet laureate and author of many masques. 1) Music for the masques was provided by Robert Johnson, , and Alfonso Ferrabosco II. 2) The instruments encountered in masques were and consorts. 4. Instrumental music was valued highly in England. 5. A change in government after the English Civil War was marked by Tomkins’s “Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times.” 6. At the Restoration of Charles II, French music became the dominant influence on the English court because Charles had spent his exile in France. 7. Restoration culture thrived on luxurious living, often to the point of licentiousness. 8. Theaters were revived, and productions contained many musical numbers. a. Restoration masques were more elaborate than earlier ones. b. Some interludes even had their own plots, almost to the point of being one-act operas. c. These semi-operas were essentially tragédies lyriques or comédies-ballets (depending on the subject) adapted to English tastes. 1) They combined characters who never sang (the important characters) and those who always sang (incidental characters). 2) The first success was The Tempest by Matthew Locke, 1674. 3) The most ambitious was ’s The Fairy Queen, 1692.

B. Purcell’s and the Question of “English Opera” 1. Purcell (1659–95) was a musical genius who wrote for all genres available to him. a. He was organist at and the , for which he composed. b. He also wrote for the theater. 2. Dido and Aeneas is his only stage work meant to be sung throughout. a. An earlier such work, and Adonis (ca. 1683), was composed by his teacher, . 3. The plot for Dido and Aeneas comes from Virgil’s Aeneid. 4. English is difficult to set to music because the accentuation patterns do not lend themselves to music. 5. Dido and Aeneas is a synthesis of Italian and French styles. a. Group activities (dances, choruses, instrumental numbers) are French. b. Solo singing is Italianate (including and madrigalisms). 6. It includes three pieces set to ground basses, for which Purcell had a particular affinity. a. “Dido’s Lament,” a famous aria at the end of the work, is based on the descending tetrachord, encountered earlier in Monteverdi’s music. 1) Purcell changes the ground bass to a five-measure pattern, and the vocal line does not and fall exactly with the bass. 2) The use of devices such as suspensions adds to the descending effect of the bass, as well as increasing the intensity of the harmony. 7. Purcell’s stage music was soon forgotten, not rediscovered until the nineteenth century.