Musikalische Exequien

In late 1635, Heinrich Phostumus von Reuss, lord of Gera, Oberkranichfeld, and Lobenstein, commissioned Schütz to compose the music for his own funeral. The count, who had carefully selected the hymns and biblical passages to be set to music, ordered his coffin

to be assembled and adorned with these same texts. Many of them could have been taken from the Manuale de Preparatione ad mortem (1593) by Martin Moller, for whom dying blessed meant «to end one’s life from the right and true faith by departing to sleep joyfully and softly.» In this context, the Musikalische Exequien were conceived as a monument to extol the figure of Reuss, endorsing, in turn, and before the entire assembly on the day of his funeral, his status as saved and blessed.

The first section, Concert in Form einer teutschen Begräbnis-Messe, is structured in the form of a Latin Kyrie and Gloria, transferring the alternating soli and tutti of the capella to a large-scale dialogue between biblical texts and Lutheran hymns. The second part, Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe, is a motet for a double choir of eight voices in the Venetian style closest to Gabrieli. Finally, Herr, nun lässest du deinen Diener in Friede fahren, written for double choir, places the listener before a musical and textual superimposition of the earthly and divine realities. While the choir of the living follows the words of the elder Simeon, the choir of seraphim, distanced from the first as far as possible by Schütz’s indications, superimposes its Selig sind die Toten, creating a prodigious simultaneity of music and text.

The musical rhetoric appropriate to the construction and employability of a «divine» sound has its foundations in the study of echo’s effects in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Italian poetry. Thus, in the words of Michael Praetorius, celestial music and the relationship between the world of the living and the dead finds its expressive fullness in the alternation per choros, preferably far from each other. We can still take pleasure in recalling how Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem confirmed the timeliness and validity of this device more than three hundred years later. In this vein, the work’s finale culminates by assimilating the low voice of the heavenly choir to the person of the deceased, who sings the joy of death before the last earthly prayer of the aged Simeon: on the very day of Reuss’s funeral, February 4, 1636, the biblical elder’s onomastic was commemorated.

With his music, Schütz extended a complex network of rhetorical meanings –for example, the madrigalism granted to the departure to the afterlife in the word “Dahren»– which, added to an exuberant use of harmony and counterpoint, confer on the Musikalische Exequien a privileged place in the history of music to which today, with total actuality, there is a sense of reverential gratitude.