Luogo e data di registrazione		St. Emmeram, Regensburg (Germany) - 28 giugno / 10 luglio 1971 & 13/18 settembre 1972
	Original Editions		Archiv Produktion | 2722 007 | 3 LP | (p) 1972 | ANA | stereo
	Edizione "Codex"		Archiv Produktion "Codex" | 453 179-2 | durata 60' 59" · 69' 18" | LC 0113 | 2 CD | (p) 1996 | ADD | stereo
	Executive Producer		Dr. Andreas Holschneider
	Recording Producer		Dr. Gerd Ploebsch
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Cover		King David playing a harp (detail of the initial "B", from the Bamberg Psalter, 13th century)
	Note		Original-Image-Bit-Processing - Added presence and brilliance, greater spatial definition

ORIGINAL EDITIONS 3 LP - 2722 007 - (p) 1972

Treasures from Archiv Produktion’s Catalogue A rare and valuable collection of documents is the pride of any library or archive. CODEX, Archiv Produktion’s new series, presents rare documents in sound from 50 years of pioneering recording. These recordings have been digitally remastered using original-image bit-processing technology and can now be appreciated in all the richness of their original sound-image. They range from the serene counterpoint of a Machaut, the intensely spiritual polyphony of a Victoria, to the imposing state-music of a Handel. For the artists on Archiv Produktion recordings, a constant aim has been to rediscover the musical pulse of past times and to recreate the spirit of past ages. In this sense each performance here - whether by Pro Musica Antiqua of Brussels in the 1950s, the Regensburg Domchor in the 1960s, or Kenneth Gilbert and Trevor Pinnock in the 1970s - made a vital contribution to the revival of Early Music in our time. CODEX highlights recordings that were unique in their day, many of them first recordings ever of this rare and remarkable repertoire, now appearing for the first time on CD. A special aspect of the history of performance in our century can now be revisited, as great moments from Archiv Produktion’s recording history are restored and experienced afresh. Dr. Peter Czornyi Director, Archiv Produktion HEINRICH SCHÜTZ'S "PSALMES OF DAVID" (1639) Heinrich Schütz’s Psalmen Davids first appeared in print in 1619, two years after their then 32-year-old composer had taken up his official appointment as Hofkapellmeister in Dresden. It is presumably this volume, described by later editors as the composer’s op. 2, to which the now 66-year-old Schütz was referring when he wrote retrospectively in 1651: “When I first returned to Germany from Italy in 1613, I resolved that for the next few years I would keep to myself with the good foundations that I had now laid in music, going into hiding with them, as it were, until I had refined them somewhat further still and was then able to distinguish myself properly by bringing forth a worthy piece of work.” Schütz had spent the years between 1609 and 1613 in Venice, studying with Giovanni Gabrieli. On his return to Germany, he was expected to complete his studies in law, which he had begun in 1608, but his love of music soon gained the upper hand, and so his former protector, the Landgrave Moritz of Hesse, created the post of second court organist specially for him at Kassel. With hindsight, Moritz must later have come to regret lending out his protégé for a baptism at the Dresden court, since the Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony thereafter left no stone unturned in his attempts to lure the young Schütz to Dresden, finally persuading “Sagittarius” (as Schütz was called in Latin documents of the time) to become his de facto Kapellmeister. Two major events soon offered Schütz an opportunity to show the electoral Kapelle in a new and splendid light: the first, in July 1617, was a state visit by the Emperor Matthias and his vast entourage (including the famous military commander, Albrecht von Wallenstein), the second the elaborate celebrations held to mark the centenary of the Reformation on  31 October 1617. Two of Schütz’s Psalmen Davids - settings of Psalms 98 and 100 respectively - are known to have been performed on this second occasion. The entire collection of psalms must have been printed during the first half of 1619 at the latest. Schütz dated his foreword l June, thereby providing a terminus ante quem. This was the day on which he married Magdalena Wildeck, the daughter of a court official described in contemporary documents as responsible for keeping an account of the elector’s land-tax and tax on alcohol. The brilliance of Schüty's large-scale concerti per choros recalls similar pieces by Giovanni Gabrieli and was well calculated to suggest a composer who, delighting in life and his creative gifts, had an outstanding future ahead of him. Yet these yea-saying works, with their rich-toned sonorities, were in all too stark a contrast with the subsequent course of events. Schütz’s wife died after only six years of marriage; and the increasing hardships of the Thirty Years War inevitably led to a reduction in the Kapelle’s strength and soon put an end to lavish music-making. Schütz sent copies of the 1619 print, together with invitations to his wedding, to addresses all over Germany, including with them dedicatory poems by a number of his poetically inspired fiiends that praise in the effusive terms of Baroque rhetoric a musician who was compared not so much to Orpheus (who famously caused the very stones to dance) as to the Archangel Raphael, who was permitted to sing in God’s ear. We can only speculate on the extent to which these psalms were ever performed in church. Although there were still services of thanks-giving and celebrations of peace when festive music was required, the impending chaos of war can scarcely have favoured their regular performance and, to the extent that musical settings of psalms were needed at all, the technically and musically simpler Becker Psalter was the obvious one for Schütz’s contemporaries to fall back on, at least from 1628 onwards. This was a collection of four-part settings based on the popular psalm paraphrases of the Leipzig theologian Cornelius Becker that soon acquired literally canonical status at services at the Dresden court. In 1653, in one of the final petitions that he wrote in his attempt to gain an official pension, Schütz expressed his intention of setting Luther’s prose psalter “in such a way that the common people may easily be able to learn these melodies and sing with them in church”. But he never realized this aim. Polyphonic settings of the psalms are first recorded in the 14th century. It was for these settings that falsobordone writing was developed, a style that Schütz himself occasionally employed (a particularly impressive example occurs in his setting of Psalm 84, where it is used over three whole verses, beginning with the words: “Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer”). It was easier to set a densely worded text in falsobordone than in the so-called motet style. Not until around 1500 do we find Latin psalm motets, when (to quote Ludwig Finscher) “the newly awakened expressive urge on the part of the composers associated with Josquin encouraged them to take an interest in the idea of personal confession implied by the words of the psalms”. Thomas Stoltzer (c.1480/85-1526) was the first composer to provide musical settings of Luther’s German translation of the psalms. A century or more was to pass before the Latin psalm motet lost its hegemony in Protestant Europe and allowed composers such as Sethus Calvisius, Michael Praetorius, Melchior Franck and, finally, Schütz himself to assert the rival claims of the German psalm motet and German vocal concerto. The years that followed also witnessed the composition of some notable psalms by north German masters of the cantata such as Tunder, Böhm and Buxtehude and, above all, by Johann Sebastian Bach; yet the most striking development at this time was the emergence of a hybrid form in which the complete text of the individual psalms was interwoven with popular proverbs, exegetical observations and hymns. It is clear from this development that, in keeping with the spirit of the age, the psalms were becoming increasingly divorced from their liturgical context, allowing them to assert their claims to artistic autonomy. As Hofkapellmeister at the Lutheran court of Dresden, Schütz was also responsible for the music performed during church services, but, unlike the older Kantors and, indeed, unlike Bach a century later, he did not write his psalm settings simply in order to meet the terms of his contract. Schütz’s settings were, in part, an act of self-expression on the part of a composer who was now fully aware of his genius, while still being designed to be performed within the context of a church service, even if they consciously went far beyond the traditional framework of the liturgy. In his accompanying letter to the town council in Frankfurt am Main, Schütz drew explicit attention to the fact that his work was intended for spiritual and ecclesiastical use, and we have no reason to suppose that he was merely falling back on the usual pious formulas. Here he explains: “I have set to music some of the psalms of the king and prophet David, in the form in which they were conceived by him, and have done so, moreover, out of special devotion, in honour of God, just as everyone in his calling is obliged, first and foremost, to guide and direct his fellow men, and, in having them printed, I commend them to, and solicit, all of pious heart and Christians everywhere.” From the outset, psalms were a regular part of the Christian liturgy, including, of course, two typically Western forms of the liturgy that developed in the Middle Ages, namely, the Mass and Hours. The Lutheran Reformation consciously retained these forms, while at the same time simplifying and abbreviating them. In consequence, psalms still had a legitimate place in the main Lutheran service, where they featured at least as an Introit or Communion psalm. At Vespers they would be performed after the lngressus. Schütz’s choice of psalms was dictated, at least in part, by the Proprium de tempore, in other words, by the order of services within the annual cycle. Psalms 2, 8, 98, 100 and 110 were among those prescribed for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, while the penitential Psalms 6 and 130, together with Psalm 137, were intended for Lent and for days of repentance. Psalms 111, 23 and 98 were sung on Maundy Thursday and during Easter Week, while Psalms 100, 103, 136 and 150 and the sections of the psalm used in the final Concert could be performed on anniversaries and days of thanks-giving. The fact that Schütz included other Biblical texts in his Psalmen Davids and that psalms were also performed at services in Dresden after the Gospel reading, after the sermon and, in the case of Vespers, after the Magnificat suggests that, in keeping with the increasingly discursive style of oratory of Dresden’s famous court preachers, music was gradually breaking free from its strict liturgical ties. Concertante music could claim to be an independent interpreter of the word of God and, as such, to serve the aims of the liturgy. This not only justifies today’s practice of performing Schütz’s psalms in the concert hall as works of art in their own right, it also suggests the possibility of reintegrating them into present-day services, where attempts have already been made to recombine the traditional elements that have been displaced over the years and to place them in a new functional context. Friedrich Kalb (1972) (Translation: Stewart Spencer)