Grabbe: Madrigals and Instrumental Works – Weser-Renaissance

Somewhere in the archives of Detmold there is a portrait — I have never seen it, only heard it described — of a young Westphalian player standing awkwardly among the gondoliers and courtesans of Giovanni Gabrieli’s Venice, absorbing a language that had no business, on the face of it, traveling so far north. That is essentially the story CPO’s new disc asks us to hear: not just music, but a transplant, and whether the graft took.

Grabbe’s name means nothing to most collectors, and I confess it meant little to me either before this arrived on my desk. He was exact contemporary to Schütz — born the same year, 1585 — and like Schütz he was sent south by a music-loving patron, in this case the Lippe counts Simon VI and later Ernst, to learn the Italian manner directly from its source. What he brought home, a 1609 book of madrigals printed in Venice while he was presumably still finishing his lessons with Gabrieli, is essentially a diploma piece. A very good student’s exam, in other words — and exam pieces, however accomplished, rarely have the loose-limbed freedom of music written because a composer could not help himself.

Manfred Cordes and his Weser-Renaissance ensemble have made something of a specialty of these Northern German byways — they gave us the Praetorius Osterme.sse in this same “Renaissance im Norden” series — and their advocacy here is never less than persuasive, even when the material resists total conviction. Six singers, eight instrumentalists; the balance CPO’s engineers have struck favors an intimacy that suits the material, voices set slightly forward, the continuo harp glinting underneath like something half-remembered from a Ferrarese court rather than a Westphalian one.

And that harp is really the disc’s secret pleasure. Grabbe uses it not as ornament but as the quiet engine of the whole texture, plucking out simple supporting harmonies beneath the vocal lines in a fashion already current in Italy — Caccini’s stile recitativo hovering somewhere in the background — and the effect, in pieces like “Cor mio, deh, non languire” or the aching chromatic slippage of “Ah, misera mia vita,” is genuinely touching. You hear a young man trying on Gesualdo’s anguish for size. It doesn’t quite fit — Grabbe’s harmonic daring never approaches actual transgression — but the effort is sincere, and Cordes’s singers phrase it with real tenderness, not showing off, just letting the suspensions ache where they need to ache.

Where the collection falters, frankly, is in sheer memorability. Twenty pieces of similar scale, similar affect, similar vocabulary — pastoral suffering, Amore’s cruelty, the usual Petrarchan furniture — accumulate rather than develop. Nothing here has the melodic snap of Marenzio, nothing the harmonic shock of late Gesualcbut then almost nothing does. By comparison, Anthony Rooley’s earlier account of the madrigals on MDG (which I have not managed to track down, and note only because it exists) apparently omitted the instrumental works altogether, which seems a real loss given how well the two Pavans and the Paduana a 5 here function as structural relief — stately, four-square, faintly archaic even for 1609, but a welcome change of weather between stanzas of Amore’s torments.

The booklet, I should say, is a small monument to German musicological thoroughness and a minor failure of communication — pages on the princely patronage networks of the Weser region, on Simon VI’s court and its eventual financial collapse (the family apparently spent itself into ruin subsidizing exactly this kind of enterprise), but almost nothing on the music itself, no guidance as to which pieces might reward closest attention. A pity. Cordes’s musicians clearly know what they’re doing even where the annotators seem reluctant to say so.

Does Grabbe belong on the shelf beside Schütz and Hassler, the other two Germans who made this same Italian pilgrimage? Not on the evidence here — he’s a lesser talent, working in a language not fully naturalized. But minor figures illuminate major ones, and hearing how thoroughly, how earnestly the Italian madrigal took root this far north tells us something about the pull of that idiom across the whole of Europe circa 1600. Recommended, then, with the usual caveats for the specialist and the curious — not a disc for an evening’s continuous listening, but a fascinating hour in small doses, and Cordes’s performances make the strongest possible case for music that might otherwise vanish back into the Detmold archives from which it came.