Press Release--October 10, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Bach Collegium to perform Schütz's Musikalische Exequien

18 November 2007

Come and hear the Bach Collegium, directed by Daniel G. Reuning, perform music of hope and comfort on Sunday, November 18, 4 pm, at Trinity Episcopal Church, 611 W. Berry Street. Featured with the Collegium's 34 singers will be the Fort Wayne Early Music Ensemble, directed by Melanie and Russell Bookout, with Wayne Peterson at the organ. Vocal soloists are local musicians who are also choral singers in the Collegium:

The principal work will be Heinrich Schütz's Musikalische Exequien, a dramatic piece composed in 1635 for the funeral of Prince Heinrich von Reuss. Here is a setting of a unique, inspirational text Prince von Reuss himself chose and had inscribed for posterity on his copper coffin (see diagram), a text he commissioned Schütz to set to music for his funeral. This piece inspired Brahms two hundred years later and greatly influenced the composition of his Ein Deutsches Requiem.

The work is divided into three sections, each with unique forces:

1. Part I is a 6-voice choir setting (SSATTB) that alternates with a variety of contrasting solo combinations. The text is a paraphrase of the first two Ordinaries of the historic Divine Liturgy (the "Missa Brevis"). It expands the three-fold Kyrie ("Lord, have mercy") to include four biblical verses of explanation, and the Gloria in excelsis ("Glory to God in the highest") to include ten biblical verses and seven hymn stanzas.
2. Part II is a double choir (SATB-SATB) setting of the Psalm 73:25-26, which the prince chose for the sermon text.
3. Part III is a 5-voice choir setting (SATTB) of a paraphrase of the traditional Vespers Canticle, the Nunc Dimittis, the Canticle of Simeon. As the 5-voice choir sings the Canticle, a trio of soloists (SSB) sings a text from Revelation and Wisdom.  The two soprano soloists represent the angels bearing the soul of the prince to heaven, and the third, the bass, the soul of the prince himself. To symbolize this, the soloists will move from the choir toward the exit of the church, which reflects Schütz's own performance instructions. When Schütz, however, performed this in a venue with multiple galleries, at levels that rose into the heights of the building, sets of soloists were placed at each level. Each set would sing a phrase alone, the first starting at the lowest level with each following phrase sung alone at a higher level. With the sound literally rising into the heights, the symbolism of the angels bearing the soul of the prince to heaven was thus made dramatically realistic.

   This presentation of the Musikalische Exequien is probably the first American performance of the complete work in English.  The translation is by Daniel Reuning.

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