Heinrich Schütz

Geistliche Chormusik (1648)

Benjamin Britten

A Boy was Born (1933, revised 1958)

Notes by Kerry McCarthy

The German composer Heinrich Schütz was born exactly 100 years before J. S. Bach. He has sometimes been typecast by historians as a mere precursor or warm-up act for the great music of the late Baroque. Tonight’s program is ample evidence that this is wrong. Schütz was an inexhaustibly creative and original musician, from his youthful years in Italy with Giovanni Gabrieli (much to the disappointment of his family, who expected him to study law instead) to his haunting late works, many of them composed when he was in his eighties. All the stylistic currents of the seventeenth century flow through his music. He could – and did – write in the most up-to-date Italian fashion, but he also valued the intricacies of counterpoint and the legacy of the Renaissance motet. Some of his contemporaries thought that the old-fashioned art of counterpoint was best suited for young students and for provincial church musicians who could not make a decent showing in a more “modern” style. Schütz himself wrote that this was absurd: composers who merely make beautiful sounds without understanding the detailed inner workings of music are “no better than an empty nut.” The most eloquent proof, of course, is in his music, which is both intricate and very beautiful.

It is something of a miracle that these works were composed and printed at all. Germany was being devastated at the time by the Thirty Years’ War, which had begun in 1618 as a local religious and territorial conflict, but soon devolved into a gruesome pan-European free-for-all which dragged on for a full generation and killed up to two-thirds of the civilian population in some German-speaking areas. The war came to an end just a few months after Schütz published the collection of Geistliche Chormusik featured in tonight’s program. Modern historians have given it the dubious distinction of being the first “total war.” As always, culture and sanity were among the first casualties. Schütz himself lost many of his fellow-musicians (Das ist je gewißlich wahr is a memorial for one of them, Johann Hermann Schein, who died in 1630) and was forced to travel around northern Europe for nearly a decade in search of stable patronage. He wrote in the preface to his Kleine geistliche Konzerte (two of which we have included on our program) that these small-scale pieces, published in the late 1630s, were modest offerings in the face of the “great decline... and, in some places, utter ruin” of German music. Mid-seventeenth-century Germany was not an ideal moment to plead for either art or immortality; the astonishing thing is that Schütz did both, and did it so well.

Most of these thirteen pieces are associated with the Christmas season. This is obvious in works such as Hodie Christus natus est und Der Engel sprach, with their angels, shepherds, and alleluias. It is less clear in other cases. Christmas Day was not an isolated event in the Lutheran calendar: the commemoration of Christ’s birth began in early December with the four weeks of Advent, and continued through Epiphany (the arrival of the Three Kings on January sixth) and Candlemas (the presentation of the infant in the temple on February second, the prescribed forty days after his birth.) Each of these events had a distinctive flavor, reflected in music for the season: the eager preparation and stern apocalyptic warnings of Advent, the joy of the Nativity, and the slightly melancholy radiance of Candlemas, as Simeon, the aged holy man, received the child Jesus in the temple and declared (in the words of Herr, nun lässest du deinen Diener) that he could now end his life in peace.

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Britten was born in 1913 on the feast day of St. Cecilia, the patron of music, and showed an extraordinary creative talent from his earliest years. By the age of six or seven he had already composed short songs, pieces for the piano, and a little play called The Royal Falily (sic!), complete with incidental music. He soon learned to play the viola and the organ, and his parents took him on frequent trips to London, where he could browse through music shops and follow the work of modern composers. When he left home for boarding school at fourteen, the music teacher greeted him with some suspicion: "So you are the little boy who likes Stravinsky!" His classmates showed "vocal and energetic surprise" when they found him reading orchestral scores in bed. He went on composing under all possible conditions; his well-known Hymn to the Virgin for double choir was written on hand-drawn staff paper in the school infirmary. Older composers, among them Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland, began to notice his unusual gift. After two years, he realized a conventional British public-school education was insufficient for his needs. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and spent three years in London earning a music degree. He was still somewhat unhappy after beginning the standard composition course, which he felt discouraged his creativity, but he enjoyed the luxury of composing without the distractions of a schoolboy's schedule, and he loved hearing his music performed by eager and competent colleagues.

His first officially published work was the Sinfonietta, op. 1, an elaborate chamber piece for ten players that explored various facets of instrumental tone-color. A Boy was Born, op. 3, composed during the winter of 1932-33, is in many ways the choral counterpart to his Sinfonietta. It uses endless combinations of human voices and audacious, almost reckless, gestures to achieve the full range of sounds conceived in Britten's mind. (He was no stranger to unusual effects; as a twenty-year-old film composer, he recorded a cymbal crash and played the tape slowly backward to create the illusion of an approaching train.) Its original subtitle was Choral variations for men's, women's and boys' voices, and it is indeed a set of variations on a tiny theme -- this theme can be heard as the first four notes of the soprano, D E G E, and hundreds of times throughout the piece. In the old tradition of instrumental variations, A Boy was Born begins simply, almost like a hymn or chorale, and passes through a series of transformations on its way to a spectacular finale.

The text of Britten's theme is the English translation of a German Renaissance carol: Puer natus in Bethlehem, unde gaudet Jerusalem.... The other texts are an eclectic mix, mostly of fifteenth-century folk origin, but including Thomas Tusser's rather practical instructions on managing the holiday season well (Variation 6: "Get ivy and hull, woman, deck up thine house..."), and Christina Rossetti's poem In the bleak midwinter, a Christmas carol best known in the famous setting by Edward Elgar. At this early stage in his career, the composer already showed the great care for selecting and adapting texts that would characterize his vocal works for the rest of his life. Even the final section, a rondo-like movement containing fragments from the preceding six variations, is carefully organized as a reminiscence of what has come before.

The music itself is unusually elaborate for a choral composition, even considering the high standards of twentieth-century British choirs. The first variation is accompanied by a "rocking" figure, begun in the soprano and passed from voice to voice. The second is a four-part piece for tenors and basses, using rough dissonances and a frenzied tempo to evoke the wrath of King Herod. The third returns to the simple hymn-like style of the opening, with a boy soloist soaring above the chorus. The fourth recalls the theme in an endless thread of eighth notes, ranging from the second basses' low F to the first sopranos' F three octaves above; each voice takes up where the previous one left off, creating an effect of perpetual motion. The fifth is a impressionistic setting for four-part women's chorus, a delicate fabric over which a group of boys sing a simple folk-like melody. The sixth and last is a long finale which draws together the different threads of the piece into one grand gesture. It betrays some youthful over-enthusiasm in the sheer number of notes and the demands made on the singers, but it is held together by the recurring theme and an endless supply of new material. It falls into two sections, the second beginning with a brilliant stroke of vocal "orchestration": all voices, both male and female, fading in and out in absolute unison on the D above middle C. Britten re-used this technique ten years later, to great effect, for the opening of Rejoice in the Lamb.