A gate to a sound world

One of the best-known motets by Schütz has accompanied us for several years and has become a real favorite of ours. We love singing the motet right at the beginning of a concert. The first two chords are very simple, but effective! It is like opening the gate to a sound world which immediately enchants listeners! In our rehearsals we hit on the idea that in the 17th century, the word “also” [therefore] was probably pronounced differently from today, with the emphasis on the second syllable – at least with Schütz this sounds highly likely (and for good reason), when the pitch and harmonic tension rises from A minor to E major and the scene is set, so to speak, for what follows. Then the piece really begins, and full of thankfulness we sing of the love of God, with rhythmically thrilling joy in performing, sometimes in contrapuntal writing, sometimes concise. Through the repetition of the sections we have a lot of freedom to shape the piece, to narrate the text in a great variety of ways, and it can be wonderful to add loud and soft into the mixture here. We feel that the final triple-time section is often performed with the wrong tempo relationship, that is, too fast. Then the life everlasting rushes past you … A peaceful 2:3 relation seems better and more correct to us, then the life everlasting and our anticipation of it have a fitting grandeur.

Incidentally, Dolf Rabus, the founder and director of the Musica Sacra Festival in Marktoberdorf, uploaded a live recording of “Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt” on YouTube in 2008. This video remains the most frequently-watched Calmus video, and it is evidently also a favorite piece amongst our listeners. Schütz therefore has a successful presence on the internet and is indispensible in the digital world of the 21st century!