Dresden in the winter of 1619. Heinrich Schütz, forty-four years old and freshly returned from his second Italian sojourn, sat down to dedicate the Psalmen Davids to his patron, the Elector Johann Georg I. What he had brought home from Venice was nothing less than a revolution — the polychoral splendors of San Marco, the lessons of Giovanni Gabrieli absorbed so deeply they had become bone and muscle rather than mere craft. The result was a collection that would define sacred music in the German-speaking lands for a generation.
That historical weight matters when you put on a recording.
Rudolf Mauersberger and the Dresdner Kreuzchor understood this with an intimacy that no amount of scholarly preparation can fully replicate. The Kreuzchor is not simply a chorus. It is an institution that traces its roots to the thirteenth century, and it has inhabited Dresden’s sacred acoustic the way a hand inhabits a glove worn smooth over centuries. This 1965 recording — remastered, breathing again — carries that specificity in every bar. You hear it in the boys’ voices at the top of the texture, bright and slightly edged, nothing like the rounded Continental tone that became fashionable later.
The architecture of these psalm settings is worth sitting with a moment. Schütz borrowed the double-choir antiphony of Gabrieli but he did something subtler and more intelligent with it: he stratified his forces. The coro favorito — smaller, more agile, its lines melismatic and winding — plays against the coro capella, which is larger, more massive in attack, its writing largely syllabic, built for resonance rather than ornament. When Schütz wants grandeur he piles both forces together. When he wants intimacy, or argument, or the human voice addressing God with something like desperation, he strips back to the favorito alone. It is a rhetoric as sophisticated as anything in Monteverdi, and considerably less celebrated than it deserves.
“Ich hebe meine Augen auf zu den Bergen” — that’s Psalm 121, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills” — opens with the favorito choir in what sounds almost like an inquiry, a tentative lifting of the phrase, before the capella answers with its full weight. Mauersberger manages the physical placement of the two groups with real theatrical intelligence; the sense of sound arriving from different distances in the room is not just acoustically gratifying but dramatically right. The music was conceived for the Royal Chapel at Dresden, a space whose resonance was part of the compositional calculation, and the recorded acoustic here — generous but not blurry — serves that intention honestly.
“Warum toben die Heiden” — Psalm 2, the nations conspiring and the peoples plotting in vain — is among the most urgently argued pieces in the collection. Short, densely worked, its two choral masses bouncing hard phrases back and forth like an argument no one is winning. This is the kind of piece that reveals what Schütz understood about the German language that Gabrieli could not: that German syllables hit differently, that the language wants a different kind of rhythmic articulation, and that the drama has to come from accent and weight rather than from the long, vowel-rich cantilenas that Italian made so natural. Mauersberger’s forces get this exactly. The consonants land.
Seventy-five minutes is a long time to spend inside a single compositional world, and I’ll confess that played straight through, end to end, the disc can feel more like a liturgical duty than a musical experience — which is, I suspect, precisely the wrong way to approach it. Schütz did not intend these psalms to be consumed as an album. They were occasional pieces, fitted to specific moments in the liturgical calendar, each one a self-contained act of devotion. Heard that way — one here, two there — the variety in scale and temperament becomes vivid rather than monotonous, and the shorter settings in particular can stop you cold with their concentrated force.
Competing versions have come and gone. Helmuth Rilling’s accounts are capable and well-prepared in the way that Rilling’s accounts of everything are capable and well-prepared. Hans-Christoph Rademann, who now leads the Dresdner Kammerchor, has brought a sharper scholarly edge and a lighter, more articulated texture to this repertoire. But Mauersberger’s album has something those versions do not quite replicate: a sense that the music is being made by people for whom this is not a project but a practice. The Kreuzchor sang this music in Dresden — sang it, one imagines, with an awareness of what Dresden had meant, what it had lost, what the act of singing in that city in 1965 actually cost.
That is not sentimentality. It is context. And in music as rooted as this — rooted in place, in faith, in a specific idea of what sound does to a stone room and to the souls inside it — context is everything.
The epitaph they gave Schütz in the old Frauenkirche called him saeculi sui musicus excellentissimus: the most distinguished performer of his time. Most people who think they love early music have barely scratched the surface of what he actually wrote. Start here.
