Crossing Confessional Boundaries: The Patronage of Italian Sacred Music in Seventeenth-Century Dresden.

Mary E. Frandsen. Crossing Confessional Boundaries: The Patronage of Italian Sacred Music in Seventeenth-Century Dresden.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xiv + 514 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. bibl. $49.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-517831-9.

Frandsen's book, based on her earlier doctoral dissertation "The Sacred Concerto in Dresden, ca. 1660-1680" (1997), is a model of painstaking research of hitherto-neglected documentary sources. In a sense it is a double volume. On the one hand, it is a thorough, enlightened, and effective discussion of the inter-confessional ambiguities of the Dresden court and its liturgical practices in the second half of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, it also includes a detailed description and analysis of the music of the court's two leading Italian composers, Albrici and Peranda. In both areas the author deftly traverses history, politics, musicology, theology, and liturgy with equal facility and insight.

Italian influence had always been marked in the music of Germany from the sixteenth century onward, as is evidenced in the compositions of Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schutz (who visited Italy twice), and the presence of Italians in German courts, such as Dresden, that had five or six Italians in its capella, including Antonio Scandello, capellmeister between 1568 and 1580. But such Italian musicians tended to disavow their Catholic heritage and converted to Lutheranism. In the second half of the seventeenth century there was a significant change: not only were there more Italians at the Dresden court, but they retained their confessional allegiance. This new situation was brought about by Duke Johann George II, who was passionate about Italianate music and therefore employed significant numbers of Italian musicians, of which two, Albrici and Peranda, became the successive leaders of the duke's capella, replacing the then aged Heinrich Schutz.

Studies of German music in the seventeenth century published in the earlier twentieth century generally tended to suggest that the music of Schutz was dominant and influential throughout the century, stressing its specific German character. The presence of Italians at the Dresden court was therefore interpreted as of minor importance. Such point of view is no longer tenable. As Dr. Frandsen effectively demonstrates, the predominate style of music of the Dresden court emanated not from any German city but from Rome, being composed, directed, and performed by Italian musicians who had worked in that city.

There were, of course, German musicians at the court, but the greater influence was decidedly Italian. The confessional differences led to the situation where the German musicians were responsible for Saturday afternoon vespers, presumably to allow the Italians to attend Mass at one of the residences of ambassadors from Catholic countries in the city--a circumstance not without controversy. The duke certainly displayed confessional ambiguity from time to time, being suspected of crypto-Catholicism when treating his Catholic musicians somewhat leniently. On the other hand, it was Johann George II who in 1667 introduced the annual celebration of Luther's Reformation on 31 October throughout Saxony, an occasion that was marked with sharp anti-Catholic polemic. The duke was taught to live and die in the faith in which he was brought up, and had attended--with his Catholic Italian musicians!--the installation of Abraham Calov, solid Lutheran and anti-Catholic polemicist, as the General Superintendent in Wittenberg in 1654. As Frandsen suggests, the duke's flirting with Catholicism had more to do with politics rather than personal convictions. She notes that there are documentary accounts that witness to his being a "staunch, if somewhat bibulous," adherent of the Augsburg Confession, adding the following contemporary assessment: "He showed an uncommon zeal for the Lutheran doctrine, and on days when he took communion, he showed so much respect for the sacrament that he did not get drunk in the morning; in the evening, however, he recovered lost time and drank all night, until he fell under the table, like all of his guests" (80).

In her discussions of the music of Albrici and Peranda, the author reveals that while there are clear differences of style between them and contemporary German composers, there is nevertheless a correspondence between them in their concern to expound in musical terms the primary teaching of the weekly and festal lections and in their expression of a Jesus-mysticism. Regarding the former, Frandsen points to the significant number of manuscript copies of these works made by German Lutheran composers in other parts of the country; concerning the latter, she draws attention to the similar tendency among contemporary Lutherans to draw inspiration from the medieval mystics and their expositions of the imagery of the Song of Songs. On this point, while the writings of Johnann Arndt, Johann Gerhard, and Heinrich Muller, among others, are noted, it is somewhat surprising to find no reference to the hymns of Paul Gerhardt, which were inspired by such emotionally-charged imagery--indeed, a good many of his hymn texts are translations of this type of mystic poetry.

One of the most important observations made here is that the compositions of these Italian composers in Dresden, expressing intimate musical devotions, made a significant contribution to the development of the cantata form that flourished in the following century, notably in the church cantatas of J. S. Bach. Frandsen has thus opened up new avenues for research and interpretation that not only help us to understand the complexities of the Catholic-Lutheran tensions of the Dresden court in the second half of the seventeenth century, but also affords new perspectives in the evaluation of the music of the Dresden court in the early eighteenth century after 1697, when Johann Georg II's successor, August "the Strong," converted to Catholicism.

ROBIN A. LEAVER

Westminster Choir College of Rider University