Music
The Schutz Festival
By DAVID CAIRNS
IT is difficult to estimate the effect of the Anglo-German Heinrich Schutz Festival on people who were not already persuaded that Schutz is a great and living master of expressive music. The Festival
was not well planned; and until the final concert, given in St. Andrew's, Holborn, by the Schutz Society of Lon- don under Roger Norrington, what I heard did not impress me as well performed, Too much of the proceedings was calculated to arouse merely the routine pious sensation of respect for an un- doubtedly important historical figure who com- bined Italian forms and Italian feeling with the serious, meditative approach which has always been characteristic of the German genius, etc. There was little to make one discover for oneself the continued vitality and the uniqueness of this corpus of religious music written in the first half of the seventeenth century for the court of the Elector of Saxony.
The opening concert struck a note of somewhat muddled good will. It was held, like the second and third, in Coventry Cathedral, a structure evidently not designed with audible musical per- formance in mind: as Wordsworth might have said, they dreamt not of a perishable tone who thus could build. And, like the other two, it had very little to do with Schutz. Ten or fifteen minutes of his music were succeeded by Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, Tippett's Double Concerto and Mozart's D minor Kyrie, K.341 and Corona- tion Mass.
It is said that- the German ambassador, on learning that Schutz, a famous German com- poser, was to be celebrated, engaged the London Symphony Orchestra for four concerts. This is a distinct advance on the attitude of some of our own diplomatic representatives abroad, but as a contribution to a Schutz festival it was strictly limited. At Coventry the LSO duly scraped and blew, but to no purpose. The RIAS Choir, brought over from Berlin, suggested a robust and sonorous if not especially imaginative body of singers; but even when the music was unaccom- panied, the cathedral's acoustics blurred details to the point of incoherence.
Another bad piece of planning was to arrange for Professor Redlich to lecture on 'Monteverdi and Schutz' at the German Institute on the same day and at the same hour that Paul Steinitz was conducting the London Bach Society, the English Chamber Orchestra and assorted soloists in a Schutz programme at Holy Trinity Church a few blocks away in Prince Consort Road. I went to the concert; but it was not one of Dr. Steinitz's evenings. I do not subscribe to the view held in some quarters that Dr. Steinitz is a more or less well-meaning amateur; at their best his Bach per- formances seem to me admirable, and I cannot imagine the chorales in the Passions better done even in heaven, to which one increasingly looks forward for release from unmusical conductors. But this Schutz concert suggested neither the con- sidered feeling for style nor the cheerful prepara- tion which such music, if it is to be profitably revived, insists on as its right.
Certain things made their point even through tentative and passionless performance, such as the two sopranos spiralling upwards in exquisite imitation in the divinely tender Herr, ich hofle darauf, one of the Kleine Geistliche Konzerte written in the middle of Schiitz's career. But a listener hearing for the first time The Christmas Story, a masterpiece of his old age, could have got small idea of what Schutz was capable of in the way of vivid narrative and convincing large-scale design. The evangelist's recitative in particular— accompanied mainly by organ without string bass and decorated as if in desperation by meaningless ornament—sounded monotonous and shapeless; this was because it tended to be hurried through, metrically and unrhythmically, and not because the work was sung in English. It is more difficult to find a satisfactory style of declamation in English, but it is not impossible, as I heard in an incomparably more lively amateur performance in Great Missenden last year.
On that occasion the evangelist's part was sung by Roger Norrington; and it was Mr. Norring- ton, as the accomplished and imaginative conduc- tor of the London Schutz Society Choir and a well rehearsed professional ensemble of instru- ments, who finally raised the Festival from the dead. Here the plan of contrasting Schutz's works with works by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries worked brilliantly. Instru- mental canzonas by Hassler (1564-1612), a delightful Magnificat by Buxtehude and Purcell's stupendous Funeral Music for Queen Mary (performed with superb grandeur and intensity) combined with some Schutz motets and the oratorio The Resurrection to make one of the most rewarding concerts of seventeenth-century music I have ever heard. The performances were fired by a most un-English passion, a wide range of dynamics and a sense of variations of rhythm and colour all of which already mark out Mr. Norrington among conductors of pre-classical music in this country.
Above all, Schutz, stripped of all museum associations, emerged as a master of dramatic music. The 'libretto' of The Resurrection, which weaves the relevant passages of the four gospels into a continuous narrative, is in itself a master- piece, with its gradually mounting excitement culminating in the solemn extended utterances of Jesus in the upper room in Jerusalem. Schutz's idiom in his oratorios (especially in the great quantity of recitative) may appear too simple and limited to modern ears when it is performed with- out understanding; but in sympathetic hands the austere beauty is quickened, the slight expressive deviations from the predominantly plain style (in passages like 'and wrapped him round in 'Take us to your leader.' swaddling clothes' in The Christmas Story) become wonderfully meaningful, and the Monteverdian audacities, such as a progression from F minor to D major at the word `traurie in Jesus' question to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, are seen to be mysteriously fused with the archaic, quasi-Gregorian side of his music. Despite the missed opportunities of the Festival, Schutz is beginning to establish himself firmly in our musical consciousness as a dramatic composer of the first rank.
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