Schütz, Heinrich (hīn`rĭkh shüts), 1585–1672, German composer; pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli. From 1617 until his death he was director of music at the Dresden court. His first German work was his Psalmen Davids (1619), in which he used the new monodic, or declamatory, style. In 1627 he set to music a German translation of Dafne, set earlier in Italian by Jacopo Peri. Schütz's work (no longer extant) has been called the first German opera. Most of his works that have been preserved were written for the church, and they mark him as the outstanding master of 17th-century church music. His Symphoniae sacrae (1629, 1647, 1650) show the influence of Monteverdi. Later, in his oratorios and his settings of the Passion as narrated in each of the four Gospels, he combined the Venetian style of alternating choirs and the dramatic declamation of Florentine monody with the German polyphonic tradition. The resultant choral style influenced German music through the time of Handel and Bach.

Bibliography

See biographical study by H. J. Moser (1936, tr. 1959).

Schütz, Heinrich

(born Oct. 8, 1585, Köstritz, Saxony—died Nov. 6, 1672, Dresden) German composer. An innkeeper's son, he was heard singing by a nobleman staying at the inn, who underwrote his education; in 1608 he entered the University of Marburg to study law, but in 1609 he began to study music with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice. The elector of Saxony in Dresden “borrowed” Schütz for a “few months” in 1614, then refused to let him return. As kapellmeister in Dresden from 1619, he published his first collection of sacred music, Psalms of David (1619). In 1628 he traveled to Italy, where Claudio Monteverdi acquainted him with new musical developments, and he adopted aspects of the Italian style in his great Symphoniae sacrae (1629) for chorus and instruments; he later published a second and third collection of Symphoniae sacrae (1647, 1650). He spent much time in Denmark and elsewhere over the next 15 years. Economic conditions deteriorated, and in the early 1650s he was no longer even being paid; he was released by the elector's death in 1656.