Bettina Varwig places the music of the celebrated Dresden composer Heinrich Schütz in a richly detailed tapestry of cultural, political, religious and intellectual contexts. Four key events in Schütz'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 Schütz'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.

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) was the most important and influential German composer of the seventeenth century. In A Heinrich Schütz Reader, the composer and his times are brought to life through the translation of more than 150 documents by or about the composer, each complemented with richly detailed annotations and commentary.

Explores the meanings of the term 'author' for seventeenth-century German musicians, examining how compositions were made and used.

His principal works are studied in chronological order, with interspersed biographical chapters covering his varied activities, his years spent in Italy and Denmark, his relationships with leading musicians and patrons, the problems presented by the Thirty Years War, and the machinations of court life. One of the greatest creative figures of his time, Schutz emerges as a giant amongst his lesser contemporaries. This book will bring him and his work to a new and international audience."--Jacket.

First published in 2005, this title provides extensive knowledge on seventeenth-century music.

"A History of Baroque Music is a detailed treatment of the music of the Baroque era, with particular focus on the seventeenth century. The author's approach is a history of musical style with an emphasis on musical scores. The book is divided initially by time period into early and later Baroque (1600-1700 and 1700-1750 respectively), and secondarily by country and composer. An introductory chapter discusses stylistic continuity with the late Renaissance and examines the etymology of the term "Baroque." The concluding chapter on the composer Telemann addresses the stylistic shift that led to the end of the Baroque and the transition into the Classical period."--Jacket.

Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque. It sheds new light on the seemingly erotic overtones in settings of the Song of Songs and dialogues between Christ and the faithful soul in late 17th- and early 18th-century cantatas by Heinrich Sch tz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Sebastian Bach. While these compositions have been interpreted solely as a secularizing tendency within devotional music of the baroque period, Isabella van Elferen demonstrates that they need to be viewed instead as intensifications of the sacred. Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or translated 17th- and 18th-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from Sch tz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history of these compositions considers the love poetry of Petrarch, European reception of petrarchan imagery and traditions, its effect on the madrigal in Germany, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, based on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than on the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological conceptions of this affect.