Schütz, Heinrich

(1585-1672)

German composer, a leading figure in 17th-century German music. Born in Köstritz, he studied in Venice with the Italian composer Giovanni Gabrieli from 1609 to 1612. From 1617 until his death he was music director to the court of the elector of Saxony, in Dresden. He traveled to Italy in 1628 to study the innovations of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and during the Thirty Years' War he took extended leaves from his Dresden post, working mostly at the royal Danish court.

Schütz combined the influences of Italian music—the multiple choirs of Venice, the use of contrasting groups of instruments and voices, the solo vocal style of the newly invented opera—with his own North German heritage of vernacular Protestant church music and 16th-century counterpoint. His powerful, expressive fusion of these elements laid the ground for all German religious music of the Baroque. Among his major works are the Symphoniae Sacrae (3 vols., 1629, 1647, 1650), the Kleine geistliche Konzerte (Small Sacred Concertos; 2 vols., 1636, 1639), motets, and oratorios, all for voices and instruments; and the three late, austere Passions (1665-1666), for choir and solo voices.

Schütz greatly expanded the range of forms of German sacred music to include not only the common motets and mass settings but also large-scale, instrumentally accompanied psalm settings (Psalmen Davids, 1619) in the Venetian style; mixed-form works such as the Musikalische Exequien (1636), a funeral service for Prince Heinrich Posthumus of Reuss; solo vocal works using the monodic style developed in Italian opera (Symphoniae Sacrae, 1629 and 1647); and narrative sacred works such as the Resurrection History (1623) and the three Passions (1664-1666).

All these works showed Schütz adapting his mainly Italian models to the expressive needs of German word-setting and the spiritual aims of German Protestantism. The stylistic evolution he underwent during his nearly 60-year composing career from the lavish and daring works of his Venetian apprenticeship to the simplicity of his final work, a German-text Magnificat (1671), showed the direction in which German sacred music would develop in the 18th century, towards the cantatas and Passions of J.S. Bach.