To keep my agèd hand in for analysis and score reading I’ve been looking through the Cantiones Sacrae (Op. 4, 1625) of Heinrich Schütz on their 400th anniversary. These 40 motets in four parts, composed on texts by Andreas Musculus and on Psalms, are considered among history’s finest polyphonic masterpieces. They are children of some of the most desperate times of the composer’s life; the 30 Years’ War was ramping up, and his wife died on 30 August, 1625. Schütz’ publisher insisted on his adding a continuo part to what was intended as purest a cappella music. It will have been found a useful support to some difficult modulations and extreme dissonances.
As usual, there are some errors in the original and in the edition I’m using. I thought I had found a series of whoppers when I got to no. XXX, Inter brachia salvatoris mei. In bar 36 (counting by double semibreves) the upper voices travel in jarring parallel fourths, four times in sequence.
I checked some performances online to see how it actually sounded. Those I heard suffered from one of the great evils of modern performance practice: too rapid tempi. The discovery of a happy alternative to the slow, heavy tempi characteristic of the 19th and early 20th centuries has led to exaggeration, just as what was initially a subtle degree of flexible timing has led to free-tempo madness. Thus does a revolution devour its children. These dotted parallel fourths flitted by so quickly on YouTube that they were as inaudible as the fluttering of butterfly wings.
The Cantiones certainly fall into the older category of tactus alla breve, which had at that point long been beaten in slow half-notes/minims, rather than conforming to the latest tendency –– a quarter-note/crotchet beat. Taken at the oft-attested tempo of 60 to the minute, the passage would be a shocker. Moving one of the voices down a third, the common Terzverschreibung, would solve the problem, resulting as it does in parallel 6ths. I was on the point of pencilling in the revision when I thought: better check the text.
Ibi securus decantabo = “there (in heaven) I will sing in safety”. Parallel fourths were not forbidden in all cases, though this example would never have gotten past the Parallel Police. Schütz certainly knew about tracts by Beckmessers; he is saying that “In My Savior’s Arms” (the motet’s title), he would be safe from them.
The first time I was made aware of this subcategory of tone-painting (Hypotyposis) was at Juilliard in 1969 or 1970. My teacher Albert Fuller had a class on various aspects of Baroque music, and one day he showed how Charpentier has parallel 5ths in a Leçon de Ténèbres on the word opprobrium. I read now that Schütz has more of these outlaw jokes for insiders. Gesualdo apparently went farthest with this kind of thing. Bach seems to have some debatable examples.
A different, less esoteric means of intentional disorientation appears in no. XXXI, Veni, rogo, in cor meum. At the text ut obliviscar ista temporalia (“that I may forget this temporal world”) Schütz employs simple chaos; a figure so difficult gets passed around the voices that it is hard to imagine singers negotiating it. The continuo is actually necessary to clarify some progressions, but even with that aid, the passage is a reflection of the mess in which the world found itself in 1625.
Now add 400 years.
21 November, 2025
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