Histories of Heinrich Schütz

Bettina Varwig places the music of the celebrated Dresden composer Heinrich Sch tz in a richly detailed tapestry of cultural, political, religious and intellectual contexts. Four key events in Sch tz's career - the 1617 Reformation centenary, the performance of his Dafne in 1627, the 1636 funeral composition Musikalische Exequien and the publication of his motet collection Geistliche Chormusik (1648) - are used to explore his music's resonances with broader historical themes, including the effects of the Thirty Years' War, contemporary meanings of classical mythology, Lutheran attitudes to death and the afterlife as well as shifting conceptions of time and history in light of early modern scientific advances. These original seventeenth-century circumstances are treated in counterpoint with Sch tz's fascinating later reinvention in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German musical culture, providing a new kind of musicological writing that interweaves layers of historical inquiry from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Author: Bettina Varwig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/03/2011
Pages: 266
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.70h x 6.90w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780521197656

About the Author
Varwig, Bettina: - Bettina Varwig is a music historian with wide-ranging interests in early modern European culture. She has held fellowships at Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Cambridge, and is now a lecturer at King's College London. She has published widely on the music of Heinrich Schütz and J. S. Bach. This is her first book.