Concerto Palatino - Collegium Vocale Gent - Philippe Herreweghe

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) worked for more than fifty years as Kapellmeister in the court chapel at Dresden and was recognized even by his contemporaries as the most important German composer of the seventeenth century. He was the first to introduce the modern Italian style of composition, which he had learned and mastered under his Venetian teacher Giovanni Gabrieli in Germany. His indebtedness to the Venetian polychoral tradition is nowhere clearer than in Der Schwanengesang, his last work. In this opus ultimum, the composer explicitly chose to return to the style that he associated with his mentor. Der Schwanengesang is a setting composed of three individual texts: the first eleven parts give voice to the lengthy Psalm 119, the second part to Psalm 100 and the final part to a Magnificat. Schütz does not seem to have written his swansong for a particular occasion, and it is highly unlikely that the work was ever performed before the twentieth century. At the time of its completion in 1670, it must have seemed quite archaic: utterly old-fashioned compared to the Neapolitan style of writing that prevailed in Dresden. The work was never published and the individual handwritten choral books for each voice were only rediscovered in the 1970s.