Schütz, Heinrich

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).

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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.

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Schütz, Heinrich 

(latinized name, Henricus Sagittarius). Born Oct. 14,1585, in Köstritz, Thuringia; died Nov. 6,1672, in Dresden. German composer, Kapellmeister, and teacher.

In 1599, Schütz became a chorister in the chapel of the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. From 1609 to 1612 he studied composition in Venice under G. Gabrieli. Schütz was the founder of many genres of German music and played an important role in stimulating musical life in Germany. He wrote numerous religious works—including passions, oratorios, cantatas, and the German Magnificat —that paved the way for many of the innovations of J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel. Schütz drew on the achievements of Italian choral, instrumental, and stage music, as well as the traditions of German religious and folk music.

Schütz was the composer of the first German opera, Daphne (1627), and the first German ballet, Orpheus and Eurydice (1638); neither of these works has been preserved.

REFERENCE

Andreev, A. “O Genrikhe Shiuttse i teorii doklassicheskoi muzyki.” Sovetskaia muzyka, 1972, no. 11.