Music and Confessional Strife: The Sacred Music of Michael Praetorius (1571/72-1621)

• Applicant: Dr. Beate Agnes Schmidt
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 226657891

The project researches the sacred music of Michael Praetorius in its functional, liturgical and secular contexts in the years before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. His extraordinarily diverse work, which has not been explored systematically, comprises more traditional polyphonic motets, over a thousand simple homophonic four-part settings, and numerous chorale motets as well as richly orchestrated sacred concerts. Particularly in the latter, Praetorius experimented with impressive sound effects, mixing Italian and English styles of music with typical German traditions. In terms of its encyclopaedic plan and its theological programme, his work is nearly unrivalled in Germany during the early Seventeenth Century. Nonetheless, no fundamental attempt has been made to investigate this oeuvre in a systematic way and particularly to take into account its characteristic intertwining between aesthetics, religion and politics.Praetorius, a director of music at the Lutheran princely courts of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Dresden and Halle, indeed viewed himself not only as a musician but also as a theologian, scholar and educator. A central concern of his theoretical and iconographic work was the defence of (Lutheran) church music against Calvinist claims to limit its use to simple psalm singing. To what extent his musical work was equally shaped by and can be seen as a response to current religious political conflicts, particularly with respect to the theological and political quarrels within the Protestant camp, will be of central concern for this project. To answer this question, the project will analyse both Praetorius`s works and his activities as a musical conductor using more recent approaches to cultural studies. Of particular interest in this context will be the impact of princely desire for prestige, late humanist scholarly discourses and private piety. In a second step, the project examines musical, rhetorical and performative aspects of his sacred music, of which the liturgical and secular performance conditions will be reconstructed. Points of departure of the study`s musical analysis will be works that are symptomatic of the individual collections and characteristically represent positions of Lutheran art policy, from simple congregational singing (especially Musae Sioniae VI-VIII) to the representative polychoral and persuasive sound production with vocal and instrumental ensemble (Motectae et Psalmi latini, Musae Sioniae I-IV, Urania and Polyhymnia Caduceatrix et Panegyrica) and the preservation of the traditional Latin liturgical music (Missodia, Hymnodia, Eulogodia, Megalynodia). As a result of a close study of Praetorius`s music against the backdrop of its religious and political contexts, the project promises to provide new insights not only into the work of the composer and music scholar Praetorius, but also into a Lutheran musical culture, open to diverse cultural influence, as a whole.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants