Schutz (review)

Schütz. By Basil Smallman. (The Master Musicians.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xvii, 218 p. ISBN 0-19-816674-5. $35.]

The life and works of Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), whom many esteem as the greatest German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach, have often been the subject of scholarly inquiry. The most recent study, by Basil Smallman, is a welcome addition to the literature on the composer. Smallman's study fares quite well when compared with Hans Joachim Moser's much lengthier Heinrich Schütz: His Life and Work (trans. Carl F. Pfatteicher [St. Louis: Concordia, 1959]; originally published as Heinrich Schütz: Sein Leben und Werk [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1936]). While Moser's book, still the most comprehensive (yet increasingly outdated) treatment of Schütz in English, includes a great deal of useful but peripheral material, his extremely discursive approach to Schütz's biography can be frustrating. In contrast, Smallman's biographical material is concise, yet rich in detail, and it is updated with scholarly discoveries made in the past few decades, many of which appear in the fine contribution by Joshua Rifkin ("Heinrich Schütz," in The New Grove North European Baroque Masters, The Composer Biography Series [New York: W. W. Norton, 1985], 1-74). Smallman takes up all of Schütz's major collections and many of the individual compositions; his detailed and erudite discussions, enriched with consideration of performance practice based on Schütz's own prefaces to his editions, reveal much about the composer's style. The biography unfailingly relates political events and personal circumstances to Schütz the composer. Though Smallman clearly has great respect for his subject and does not stint praise, he avoids the hagiographic tone adopted by some previous authors, at times offering gentle criticism (see pp. 71-72, 74, 128).

Thanks to the survival of many letters and other archival documents, scholars have been able to reconstruct Schütz's career in great detail. Throughout the text, Smallman adds color to the chronicle of Schütz's life by means of these documents, giving the reader a sense of the composer's forceful personality. Between 1645 and 1656, for example, Schütz penned a number of strongly worded communications to the elector and crown prince of Saxony, as well as to various court officials, concerning the state and future of the court music ensemble, the dire conditions in which his unpaid musicians were forced to live, and his own professional situation at court (see chap. 9). These sources provide valuable insights on the composer's character, principles, and system of values, despite the typically obsequious language in which they are couched. Smallman renders Schütz's German into accurate and idiomatic English --not an easy task. For most (but, curiously, not all) of the quoted passages, he provides the original German text in a footnote, quoted from one of the two published collections of the composer's correspondence (Schütz, Gesammelte Briefe u. Schriften, ed. Erich H. Müller [Regensburg: Bosse, 1931; reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1976] and Letters and Documents of Heinrich Schütz, 1656-1672: An Annotated Translation, ed. Gina Spagnoli [Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1992). Unfortunately, errors appear in nearly every one of the quoted German texts: words are omitted, spellings are changed, diacritics are missing or transferred to the wrong letter, nouns are transformed into verbs, and the punctuation is altered.

Smallman's discussions of the music, effectively combining description with interpretation, are so engaging that the reader will head for the compact-disc player to listen to the piece under consideration. The author points out Schütz's organizational strategies and offers many apt illustrations of how he brings the text to life--how he "reads" the words musically--by means of both word painting and more abstract text-music relationships. The excellent music examples accompanying these discussions are too few in number, and thus the reader must have ready access to a complete edition of Schütz's works. Smallman...