Wigmore Hall
Schütz – Ein Kind ist uns geboren, SWV 384; Das Wort ward Fleisch, SWV 385; O
lieber Herre Gott, SWV 381; Ich bin
jung gewesen und bin alt worden, SWV 320; Die mit Tränen säen, SWV 378; Ich
bin ein rechter Weinstock, SWV 389; Herr,
auf dich treue ich, SWV 377; So fahr
ich hin zu Jesu Christ, SWV 379; Ich
liege und schlafe, SWV 310; Unser keener
lebet ihm selber, SWV 391; Ich weiß,
daß mein Erlöser lebt, SWV 393
Interspersed with: Christopher
Fox – Trostlieder (in Widerwärtigkeit des
Kriegs), world premiere
This was a decidedly superior,
somewhat yet not excessively oblique, Advent/Christmas concert. Motets from
Schütz’s 1648 Geistliche Chor-Musik,
supplemented by a duet and an aria from the earlier (1639) Kleine Geistliche Konzerte II, framed the four parts of Christopher
Fox’s Trostlieder (in Widerwärtigkeit des
Kriegs), receiving its world premiere. Fox’s work is a cappella, whereas the Schütz pieces all have organ continuo; other
than that, the forces are similar, Schütz writing for slightly different forces
throughout his collection. The Schütz pieces offered some ‘seasonal’ quality,
in perhaps a similar measure to Handel’s Messiah
doing so. The connection with Fox’s new work, a response to James Weeks’s
invitation to compose a companion work to some of Schütz’s motets, began yet
did not end with 1648, a date burned onto the German and indeed the European
conscience and memory, as the end of the Thirty Years’ War and its attendant,
almost incredible devastation. Fox had come to know Schütz’s music in the early
1980s and ‘remembered from that time that Schütz makes a brief appearance in Günter
Grass’s 1979 novel, Das Treffen in Telgte’.
In his novel, Grass has a number of German writers meeting in the aftermath of
the war, and, as an appendix, offers an anthology from those writers, including
the first part of Martin Opitz’s Trost-Gedichte
in Widwärtigkeit des Kriegs (‘Poems of Comfort in the Dreadfulness of War’),
written earlier during the conflict. It may, or may not, be coincidental that
Opitz was also the librettist for Schütz’s Dafne,
the first German opera, whose music has, alas, been lost.
At any rate, Fox has understandably
felt parallels with both his own family’s history – the Red Army’s occupation of
Pomerania echoing the destruction of three centuries earlier – and the plight of
Syria today. They do not appear explicitly, or at least unmistakeably, in this
work; we may have other, personal and/or societal, parallels to draw. The
omnipresence of war, of state-sanctioned violence, and of the dislocation that
refugees – from the Holy Family onwards, and indeed long before that – are unlikely,
however, to leave our minds completely; they certainly did not mine. Toing and
froing from 1648 (and a little earlier) to 2015 unsurprisingly shone light upon
both similarity and difference; what was perhaps surprising was how much the
former tended to prevail over the latter.
The nature of the Geistliche Chor-Musik as a collection
has musical parallels of its own; perhaps inevitably, I thought both of
Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale
and the later practice, in so many genres, of Bach. Thinking of Schütz as the
transalpine stepping-stone – I suppose ‘Pass’ might be better, given the
terrain – between the glories of Venice and the absolute summit of Western
music is ingrained upon our musico-historical consciousness, and with good
reason. Had he not been Gabrieli’s pupil, we might have had to invent the fact.
The opening Ein Kind ist uns geboren
sounded poised between madrigalian sacred piece and the prima pratica, between homophony and counterpoint: both as work and
as performance from EXAUDI under Weeks. Darkness and yet luminosity were the Advent
hallmarks of Das Wort ward Fleisch, the
celebrated opening of St John’s Gospel made musical flesh. And even if the
sense of music travelling north from Venice to the German lands might sometimes
be a little too fanciful, a little too convenient, here again it sounded in the
setting of Luther’s translation of an Advent collect, O Lieber Herre Gott: mediated not only by the Reformation but by
the shadow of war.
The first of the four parts of
Fox’s Trostlieder then followed. The
composer’s own description of this lengthy section of text reads: ‘“May my
tongue burn with passion; let me not stumble on this barren path.” The war-torn
landscape is described: farms abandoned, the land pillaged, homes on fire. “The
sickle and plough have been sharpened into swords.”’ The harmonic language is,
of course, quite different from that of Schütz; so are many other things. There
sounded nevertheless a strong element of kinship, not least in the sorts of
writing, such as outlined above, one might hear, whether more straightforwardly
echoing those distinctions in Schütz’s music or reimagining them. It also
struck me – and this may simply be my own personal resonance – that the way in
which particular vocal lines would sometimes take a different turn from what
one might have expected, without in the least sense sounding arbitrary, offered
kinship with a composer who, rightly, or wrongly, has often been seen as
marking the end of that tradition inaugurated by Schütz: Arnold Schoenberg. Cries
of horror – ‘Ey, ey’ – proved especially, dramatically memorable. The
quasi-muttering of some of the final section and the open musical and verbal question
of the final line – ‘Wer fragt, ob Kriegeskunst List, oder Tugend sey?’ left
one wanting more: both of Schütz and of Fox. Excellent performances throughout were,
of course, part and parcel of that; it was perhaps more than usually difficult
to separate works from their performance here.
Schütz’s Ich bin jung gewesen und bin alt worden was sung by Simon Whiteley
and Jimmy Holliday with disarming clarity and sincerity, resounding as a
touching profession of faith, not least in its closing Allelujas. There
followed the second part of Fox’s work: ‘A series of images of cyclical change
in the natural world: the passage of sun and moon, night following day, changes
in the weather. “This is the way of the world, one falls, another rises, one
rises, another falls.”’ The varying textures and ‘solo’ spots somehow always
sounded ‘right’, without my necessarily being able to tell you why. A case in
point would be the placing of the countertenor on top in the third stanza ‘Zu
Zeiten ligt die See gantz stille, glatt und eben, …’. Relative flatness – I speak
not in terms of pitch, but of register: foothills, if you like, rather than
peaks – in much, although not all, of this seemed to convey or at least to
suggest a fatalism in the face of cyclical change, and perhaps also in the face
of less natural transformations. And yet, I felt tempted to think, for ‘them’
and for ‘us’, things moved. After that, the precious sadness, interspersed with
knowing, certainly not naïve, joy in what we might call salvation, sounded in
Schütz’s Die mit Tränen säen.
Restrained jubilation was also to be heard in Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock, that restraint partly a matter of
what had gone before: historically, musically, and musico-historically.
There seemed to be a little
more overt passion in Schütz’s Herr, auf
dich traue ich, whilst the hymnal quality of the ensuing So fah rich hin zu Jesus Christ, its
simplicity and its complexity, pointed towards the future of German music. The
third part of Trostlieder sounded
perhaps more overtly strange in harmonic context, at least in its opening,
repeated yet transformed, invocation. To quote Fox again, ‘Two different sets
of text. Groups of two, then three, then four singers gradually introduce these
words, an invocation against pride: … Between these sections the singers sing
together, each singing their own passage of text.’ Such was what we heard, the
singers making it sound so much easier than it can possibly have been, without
that musical ease obscuring the musical dialectic.
Holliday sang, again quite
disarmingly, the solo aria, Ich liege und
schlafe, reminding us once again of the more operatic elements of Schütz’s
writing. Coming to the final part of Fox’s work, I reflected on what seemed to
me to be the gratefulness of his vocal writing; that was certainly how EXAUDI
made it sound. ‘“We are on our way again”: images of travel, the wind
propelling our ship to shore. There is comfort in hope. “Life is like a
house-guest, to be encouraged to stay,”, yet “life goes in only one direction”,
to death.’ The interplay between cries of ‘O nein!’ and ‘Die Hoffnung,’ the
hope to which Fox alludes, seems at the heart of this part to be both a verbal
and a musico-structural concern. Much of the rest of the writing, leading us to
death, participates in Schütz-like restraint, the homophony unmistakeable.
And then: quiet, even radiant
certainty in the three final Schütz motets, Unser
keener lebet ihm selber, Selig sind
die Toten, and Ich weiß, daß mein
Erlöser lebt. That said, there was difference here too in similarity: the
quietness ,the radiance different in quality on each occasion. The final
musical flowering, again for us inevitably evoking Messiah (‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’) sounded properly,
softly German, whilst acknowledging the Italianate roots from which it had
clearly sprung.
