Matthias Weckmann: The Interpretation of his Organ Music.

The year 1991 was an important one for Weckmann studies. The University of Gothenburg promoted a Weckmann symposium, the proceedings of which have now been published; at it, Hans Davidsson defended his Ph.D. dissertation, which hsa also been published and is the principal subject of this review. In the same year, Siegbert Rampe's edition of the Samtliche freie Orgelund Clavierwerke was published by Barenreiter (not received for review (Eds.)).

Of the eleven contributions to the symposium proceedings, Frederick Gable's 'The Reconstruction of a Hamburg Hauptgottesdienst in 1660' discusses the place and function of music, whether congregational, choral, instrumental or for organ, in the church service. Another five bear directly on Weckmann, the most important being Ibo Ortgies's 'Neue Erkentnisse zur Biographie Matthias Weckmans', which considerably enlarges and modifies our knowledge of Weckmann's life. (The spelling of the surname is variable, 'Weckman' being the composer's preferred usage.) Arnfried Edler discusses Weckmann's place in the wider context of the musical and cultural life of Hamburg, a mercantile 'free' city where the ideas of the Enlightenment took early root. Curtis Lasell shows how Weckmann had become well acquainted with Italian musicians and their music while in the Dresden Hofkapelle, and continued in his collegium musicum at Hamburg to present 'modern original Italian dramatic and operatic music . . . a quarter-century before an Italian curtain rose at the Gansemarkt for the first time'. In an elegant and thoughtful article Alexander Silbiger considers Weckmann's knowledge of, and indebtedness to, the music of Monteverdi and Schutz. And Davidsson discusses Weckmann's vocal pieces from 1663, a year which saw a particularly severe visitation of the plague.

Matthias Weckmann: the Interpretation of his Organ Music is in three parts. Vol. 1 presents the main text of the discussion, Vol. 2 an edition of the free organ works; the third component is a two-CD set of the 'complete' organ works played by Davidsson on the Arp Schnitger organ at the Ludgerikirche, Norden. The title of Davidsson's work does not simply mean 'how to play Weckmann's music'; it means, rather, 'how to understand the music and so how to play it'. He begins (p. xi) by taking Willi Apel to task for his dismissive views of the chorale-based works; nor does Gerhard Ilger, writing in 1939, escape censure: both are criticized for viewing the music from the perspectives of their time, when Bach was allegedly held to embody the 'ideal form'. But there is no need to tilt at these windmills now: we can surely accept that Weckmann's music 'is a product of a period of cultural high standards at least equal to our own' without denigrating earlier scholars. Of course, one cannot be sure that future generations will judge our cultural standards to be equal to those of the seventeenth century; and we have our own perspectives that future scholars may see as equally distorting, two possible aspects of which are evident in Davidsson's study: a lack (perhaps a rejection) of intellectual rigour, and a large element of subjectivity, both of which are worrying in this context.

Davidsson's premiss is unexceptionable: in order to understand and interpret Weckmann's music aright, we must not only know as much as possible about the performance practice of his time (registration, fingering, articulation) but must also absorb the then current intellectual concepts and attitudes. Theology, rhetorical and aesthetic theory, cosmological philosophy: all these will play a part, so that performers can make their decisions 'with the confidence that they are speaking fully within the ideological "language" of the time and within the "dialect" of the historical instruments and the music itself'.

Thus Part I of Vol. 1 sets out the general context: a short biography, a …