Schutz.(Review)

Schutz. By Basil Smallman. (The Master Musicians.) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xvii, 218 p. ISBN 0-19-816674-5. $35.]

The life and works of Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672), whom many esteem as the greatest German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach, have often been the subject of scholarly inquiry. The most recent study, by Basil Smallman, is a welcome addition to the literature on the composer. Smallman's study fares quite well when compared with Hans Joachim Moser's much lengthier Heinrich Schutz: His Life and Work (trans. Carl F. Pfatteicher [St. Louis: Concordia, 1959]; originally published as Heinrich Schutz: Sein Leben und Werk [Kassel: Barenreiter, 1936]). While Moser's book, still the most comprehensive (yet increasingly outdated) treatment of Schutz in English, includes a great deal of useful but peripheral material, his extremely discursive approach to Schutz's biography can be frustrating. In contrast, Smallman's biographical material is concise, yet rich in detail, and it is updated with scholarly discoveries made in the past few decades, many of which appear in the fine contribution by Joshua Rifkin ("He inrich S chutz," in The New Grove North European Baroque Masters, The Composer Biography Series [New York: W. W. Norton, 1985], 1-74). Smallman takes up all of Schutz's major collections and many of the individual compositions; his detailed and erudite discussions, enriched with consideration of performance practice based on Schutz's own prefaces to his editions, reveal much about the composer's style. The biography unfailingly relates political events and personal circumstances to Schutz the composer. Though Smallman clearly has great respect for his subject and does not stint praise, he avoids the hagiographic tone adopted by some previous authors, at times offering gentle criticism (see pp. 71-72, 74, 128).

Thanks to the survival of many letters and other archival documents, scholars have been able to reconstruct Schutz's career in great detail. Throughout the text, Smallman adds color to the chronicle of Schutz's life by means of these documents, giving the reader a sense of the composer's forceful personality. Between 1645 and 1656, for example, Schutz penned a number of strongly worded communications to the elector and crown prince of Saxony, as well as to various court officials, concerning the state and future of the court music ensemble, the dire conditions in which his unpaid musicians were forced to live, and his own professional situation at court (see chap. 9). These sources provide valuable insights on the composer's character, principles, and system of values, despite the typically obsequious language in which they are couched. Smallman renders Schutz's German into accurate and idiomatic English--not an easy task. For most (but, curiously, not all) of the quoted passages, he provides the original Ge rman text in a footnote, quoted from one of the two published collections of the composer's correspondence (Schutz, Gesammelte Briefe u. Schriften. ed. Erich H. Muller [Regensburg: Bosse, 1931; reprint, Hildesheim: C. Olms, ...