Friedensgesänge 1628–1651: Musik zum Dreissigjährigen Krieg. Werke von Johannes Werlin, Sigmund Theophil Staden, Melchior Franck und Andreas Berger by Stefan Hanheide (review)

Abstract

MUSIC FROM THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR Friedensgesange 1628-1651: Musik zum Dreissigjahrigen Krieg. Werke von Johannes Werlin, Sigmund Theophil Staden, Melchior Franck und Andreas Berger. Herausgegeben von Stefan Hanheide. (Denkmaler der Tonkunst in Bayern: Neue Folge, Bd. 22.) Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 2012. [Pref. in Ger., p. ix; introd. in Ger., p. xi-l; sources and statistics in Ger., p. li-lxxviii; crit. report in Ger., p. lxxix-civ; texts, p. cv-cxviii; facsims., p. cxix-cxxxiv; scores, p. 1-118. ISMN 979-0-00480293-9; pub. no. SON 252. i152.]The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) was a tragic period in German history. Numerous military conflicts played out in rotation across the German landscape, leaving a swath of death and destruction unmatched in scope until the twentieth century. Complete cities were razed, untold thousands died at the hands of rapacious mercenary armies, while countless others succumbed to starvation and disease. The lyric poet Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664), who in 1636 knew his homeland only a battleground, described the atrocities in grim detail in his sonnet Threnen des Vatterlandes. The country was impoverished, and everywhere the arts suffered never before. Heinrich Schutz, the Electoral Saxon Kapellmeister in Dresden, in the dedication of his Kleine geistliche Konzerte (1639) lamented the woeful state of music and the arts as if suffocated under military arms and trampled in the mud (A Heinrich Schutz Reader: Letters and Documents in Translation, ed. Gregory S. Johnston [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 111). Once-illustrious court ensembles that had previously performed lavish works for multiple choirs of singers and instrumentalists were reduced to faint shadows of their former glory. Other courts and towns were forced to disband their Kapellen and civic ensembles altogether. Publishers who were able still to produce music in print were few in number, and faced chronic shortages of paper and customers. One hoped and prayed for the return of peace and prosperity.The music contained in the present volume reflects this hope for peace, represented by the works of four composers from southern Germany and what is modern-day Bavaria: the Lindau Kantor Johannes Werlin's Irenodiae Oder Friedensgesang (1644), the Nuremberg organist and composer Sigmund Theophil Staden's Musikalische Friedensgesange (1651), the Coburg Kapellmeister Melchior Franck's Suspirium Germaniae Publicum (1628), and a concluding ten-voice Da pacem Domine (1635) by Andreas Berger, Kapellmeister to Graf Ludwig Eberhard von Oettingen. The first two works are significantly more ambitious in scope, whereas the latter two are modest compositions published individually. Together, though, especially if one pays particular attention to the texts, they reveal an optimism for a better future, if not in this world then in the next.At more than 250 pages and printed in large format (27 cm x 34 cm), this is a critical edition ideally suited initially for scholarly study, but the works inside deserve to be heard. The front matter, running to 134 page in length, is exhaustive, rich in information, painstaking in detail, and abundantly referenced throughout. The first 60 pages or so are devoted to biographical entries on each of the four composers, the general historical background and context of the music, the origins and specific occa- sion of the works, full transcriptions of title pages and dedicatory poetry and texts, the authorial sources of the poetic texts, and issues of genre and formal characteristics of the compositions. It is also in these pages that the editor elaborates in great detail on aspects of the musical style and the original printed edition: notation, time signatures, barlines and other indications of meter, tempo indications, slurs and ties, accidentals, mode, and so forth. Statistical data on text, metric changes, voicing, mode, ambitus, and even whether or not the basso continuo part includes a textual incipit occupy a further fifteen pages of fine print (pp. …