Leipzig Church Music from the Sherard Collection: Eight Works by Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Schelle, and Johann Kuhnau ed. by Stephen Rose (review)

The material legacy of German church music from the mid-seventeenth through the early eighteenth century is somewhat paradoxical. What remains available to us today does not reflect, in sheer numbers and variety, the musical activity that took place in that time, but certainly demonstrates how different values—market, aesthetic—have shaped our musical inheritance. The economic pressures and limited resources available to churches in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War made the use of printed, small-scale pieces financially sound. Civic churches and smaller court chapels could rely on printed chorale harmonizations along with small-scale concerto, dialogue, and motet collections. As a result, the printed music of a small number of composers such as Melchior Franck, Wolfgang Carl Briegel, Andreas Hammerschmidt, Johann Caspar Horn, and Johann Rudolph Ahle survive in numerous copies across central Germany. As economic fortunes rose toward the end of the century, and churches could employ music directors with compositional skills, the role of cantor came to include not only music direction and instruction, but also the composition of new pieces for the liturgy. Now towns and smaller courts could rely on the creative products of their own musicians to augment and eventually replace mass-produced music already in circulation. The social prestige that accompanied unique creative works, and the pressures of a rapidly changing musical and devotional fashion contribute to the paradox—what made the works of these cantors locally valuable was not their “objective” musical or artistic worth, something that one might want to re-create elsewhere, but rather their scarcity itself. These were works composed for a specific time and place, valued by their auditors for their originality within their local social sphere. The work of these composers, which must have amounted to tens of thousands of unique pieces, is largely lost, owing to the very ad hoc nature that lent them social prestige: their successors found little use for them, and the collections were dispersed, sold, and often eventually destroyed.

What little remains of this previously vast assortment of music is largely thanks to indifference rather than active curation. Music in the Düben collection, named for the Swedish organist and composer Gustaf Düben (1628–1690), for example, today valued for its assortment of pieces by Dieterich Buxtehude, and nearly the entire Gospel cycle by the Saxe-Lauenburg Kapellmeister Augustin Pfleger (ca. 1635–after 1686), was donated in 1732 to the Uppsala library by the collector’s heir, Anders von Düben. The collection remained uncataloged and virtually forgotten in an attic for some 150 years until its virtual “rediscovery” in 1888. The collection owned by Heinrich Bokemeyer (1679–1751) with music by Joachim Gerstenbüttel (1647–1721) and Johann Philipp Förtsch (1652–1732), was treated somewhat better in the hands of the collector’s son-in-law, and then Johann Nicolaus Forkel, before being deposited in the Königliche Bibliothek, now the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Even the generation of J. S. Bach fared little better. Only little remains of the once significant body of sacred music by the esteemed Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1749), whose twelve annual cantata cycles are almost entirely lost. The more than 1,400 cantatas by the Darmstadt Kapellmeister Christoph Graupner (1683–1760) survived despite the family’s attempts to divide and sell it. Following the composer’s death, Graupner’s musical...