Every schoolboy knows – well, a few do – that the music of the German Baroque was built upon the works of three composers, Schütz (Heinrich), Schein (Johann) and Scheidt (Samuel), all born within three years in the mid-1580s.
The first three letters of their surnames have spawned plenty of feeble jokes.
But their music was something else. It wedded the then new-fangled and jazzy Italian styles of madrigal, monody and concerto to the more strait laced language of Lutheran church music. The results were on majestic display when the five singers of La Capella Ducale teamed up with their regular partners, the trombones, cornetts and continuo of Musica Fiata.
The biblical texts were in German, while the secular, some of them frankly erotic, were cloaked in the decent obscurity of Latin. Great stuff, both of them: just don’t tell the Dean and Chapter. But the musical styles were very similar. The closing decorations for two sopranos in Schütz’s Anima Mea Liquefacta Est (My soul turned to jelly – you can imagine the rest) were straight out of Italy.
So too were the echo-fanfares of a five-part Canzona by Scheidt, where three trombones and a dulcian made hay among the tricky textures. These were the forerunners of the multi-choir techniques later used in Venice. But with singers and players as gifted as this, we were often duped into hearing a full choir or band, or both. Brilliant.
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