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Notes 58.1 (2001) 180-183



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Review

Dedication Service for St. Gertrude's Chapel, Hamburg, 1607


Dedication Service for St. Gertrude's Chapel, Hamburg, 1607. Edited by Frederick K. Gable. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 91.) Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, c1998. [Acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii-xxxv; texts and trans., p. xxxvi-xl; 6 plates; score, 131 p.; crit. report, p. 133-38; appendix, p. 139-46. ISBN 0-89579-418-7. $64.95.]

The Lutheran service that is the subject of this remarkable volume created by Frederick K. Gable was held early in the morning of Thursday, 16 April 1607, in Hamburg's Chapel of St. Gertrude to celebrate the rededication of this structure, which had been extensively renovated after a recent fire. The chief pastor of the neighboring St. James's Church, Lucas van Cöllen, delivered the sermon on this occasion in which the most important musicians of the city participated. He was so impressed with the dignity and appropriateness of this service--which featured "hymns, [musical] instruments, sermons, and prayers, after the manner of Solomon," and not the popish "crosses, banners, incense, holy oils, and the like" (p. viii)--that he published a detailed account of the ceremony two years later in the preface to the text of his sermon. Although the only documented copy of this publication was destroyed in World War II, the text of van Cöllen's Low German preface survives in several transcriptions and translations into High German, the most authoritative of which, as Gable indicates, is the quotation in Liselotte Krüger's dissertation Die hamburgische Musikorganisation im XVII. Jahrhundert (Strassbourg: Heitz & Co., 1933; reprint, Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1981). As presented by Gable in both its original form and an English translation, the part of van Cöllen's preface that recounts the service gives information about the five works (all polychoral) performed by the trained singers and instrumentalists, as well as the two chorales also sung by the congregation. Van Cöllen also describes the initial ringing of bells, the opening antiphon (sung in chant), the sermon, an organ prelude to the first congregational chorale, and the blessing. Gable characterizes van Cöllen's account as "the most complete description of a specific liturgical church service that has come down to us from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries" (p. vii). In spite of its comprehensiveness, however, the preface describes only about half of the entire service. Gable had to identify and supply the five organ preludes and several liturgical texts, all but one of which he also provides with music for chanting: two salutations and collects, the epistle, the Gospel (not chanted), the Lord's Prayer, and the benediction. Gable's selections are appropriate to the context, and his sources are valid--he takes the organ preludes from the tablature books of Lüneburg (ca. 1650-56 but containing earlier repertory) and Celle (1601), and reconstructs the texts and chants from several Lutheran liturgical publications of the sixteenth century, as well as a Hamburg Bible of 1596.

As significant as it is, van Cöllen's preface does not give complete or even accurate information for every musical composition that it cites. To identify these pieces, therefore, Gable had to rely on both deduction and guesswork. For example, the first choral work is described as the "introit In nomine Jesu by Bandovius" (this and all subsequent quotations from the preface are found on p. viii of the edition). Finding no composer by that name, Gable selected the only eight-part setting with this title known to have been available in 1607--a motet by the Netherlander Pierre Bonhomme published in his Melodiae sacrae (Frankfurt: Nikolas Stein, 1603). Gable conjectures that a printer may have distorted the name of the composer cited in the preface by misreading van Cöllen's handwritten "Bonhomius" as "Bandovius." The fact that the name actually appears in the preface as "Bandovii" (the genitive form) does not alter the issue, which is that to accept Gable...

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