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Contents:
DDD Total Time = 59.22 / Recorded in Queens'College Cambridge ‘Away with the mumbling of your songs, and neither do I want to hear the sound of your lyre’. These words of the Zurich Reformer Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) signalled a sea-change in the music life of his city. He wrote them in 1523; a year later, all pictures were ripped from the walls of the Zurich churches and the playing of the organ was banned. In 1525, the singing of hymns in church was forbidden too. Just a few years earlier, the city’s two main churches, the Grossmünster and the Fraumünster, had vied with each other to see who could build the most splendid, most expensive organ. But on 9 December 1527, all organs in the city’s churches were torn down. They were not replaced until the 19th century. In the Middle Ages, high feast days such as the anniversary of the death of the city’s patron saints had been celebrated with much pomp and elaborate music, with travelling pilgrims praising the ‘wonderful’ masses that were sung. But the Reformation brought this to an end. Almost all sources of the city’s earlier musical life were either lost or intentionally destroyed. In recent years, it has been suggested that Zwingli regarded the elaborate pre-Reformation church music as no more than a ‘good work’ with which Man tried to attain salvation, and thus should be done away with. Be that as it may, it is certainly ironic that music should have been banned by a man who was himself a great music-lover. He had enjoyed a solid musical education and, according to the chronicler Bernhard Wyss, he played eleven instruments. Zwingli also composed, though only three songs have been handed down that we can be certain are by him, and no autograph survives (of course, none of the songs was intended for use in church). The most famous is ‘Herr, nun heb den Wagen selb‘ (‘Lord, now lift the wagon yourself’), the so-called ‘Kappel Song’ that Zwingli is supposed to have written for the soldiers at Kappel in 1529. According to Zwingli’s friend and successor Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli himself set the song in four parts, though only his melody has survived today. When the musicologist Eduard Bernoulli discovered an organ tablature in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich (Zurich Central Library) in 1919 containing two keyboard arrangements of Zwingli’s Herr, nun heb, he first thought that he had discovered Zwingli’s original setting. However, the scribe was in fact one Clemens Hör, a school teacher and musician from St Gall, and the date of his manuscript was probably 1535-40. Besides these two anonymous Zwingli settings, the manuscript contains over forty short pieces set for organ, some of which have only survived in this source. Among the composers represented are Ludwig Senfl, Paul Hofhaimer and Heinrich Isaac. The manuscript was probably not written in Zurich, but it can serve as a good example of the kind of music being practised at home by the educated classes in Eastern Switzerland. The connection to Zurich is assured by Hör’s close friendship with Johannes Fries (1505-1565), who attended the Zurich Grossmünster School from 1527 to 1531, studied philology and music for two years in Paris, and then returned to Zurich to teach at his old school from 1537 onwards. Part-books of vocal music have survived in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich that Hör himself copied and dedicated to Fries. Hymn-singing was not reintroduced to Zurich until 1598. The initiative came from Raphael Egli, the music-loving Archdeacon of the Grossmünster, who two years before had written that singing in church was the recognised will of God according to the Bible. The first post-Reformation Zurich hymn book was accordingly brought out in 1598, the publisher being one Johann Wolff. It contained 37 psalms in Ambrosius Lobwasser’s translation, 28 festive songs, and many other pieces, all with just the melody, devoid of any accompaniment. Zwingli’s Herr, nun heb was naturally included, and is recorded in this form here, along with a Credo from the same hymn book. A new, revised version of the hymn book appeared in 1605. The third edition of 1641 included all 150 psalms, now all set for four voices – and again included Zwingli’s Herr, nun heb, which version can also be heard on this CD. In 17th-century Zurich, music in church and in the private sphere were still kept strictly separate. In order to compensate for what had been lost by the ban on elaborate church music, the Music Society ‘Of the Canons’ Room’ was founded at about the same time as singing was reintroduced into the churches. The society allowed for private music-making both vocal and instrumental. Presumably for similar reasons, the ‘Music Room Society’ was founded in 1613, to be followed in 1679 by the ‘Fraumünster Music Society’, later renamed the ‘Music Society at the German School’ (the ‘German School’ in Zurich being the local term for a primary school). In 1772, the latter amalgamated with the Canons’ Music Society. In the early 18th century, Zurich’s most important composer was undoubtedly Johann Caspar Bachofen (1695-1755). He became a member of the Canons’ Music Society in 1711, and of the ‘Society at the German School’ in 1715. From 1742 until his death, Bachofen was cantor of the Grossmünster, and president of the Canons’ Music Society. His most important work was a collection of 206 two-, three- and four-part songs published in 1727 under the collective title The Musical Hallelujah. It was soon revised and extended, and by 1803 had seen eleven editions in total. The songs of Bachofen recorded here are all taken from this collection. The most significant composer of the generation after Bachofen was Johannes Schmidlin (1722-1772). He was elected vicar of Wetzikon in the north-east of Canton Zurich in 1754. Besides his pastoral duties, he founded Wetzikon’s Collegium musicum in 1768, was active as a music teacher, and published several volumes of songs after the manner of Bachofen. Neither composer could be said to have been of the first rank, but their works have an undeniable melodic charm. Of particular interest are two cantatas that Schmidlin published in 1759. The Mourning Cantata was written on the death of the Zurich mayor Johannes Fries, a descendant of Clemens Hör’s friend of the same name who had been elected president of the Music Room Society just a few years before. The Joyous Cantata was written upon the nomination of Fries’s successor, Jacob Leu. On this CD, the complete Mourning Cantata and the opening chorus of the Joyous Cantata ‘Auf, Zürich, auf’ (‘Zurich, arise!’) - can be heard. Schmidlin’s influence was such that a so-called ‘Wetzikon School’ grew up around him, its most prominent members being his pupils Johann Heinrich Egli (1742-1810) and Johann Jakob Walder (1750-1817). Egli moved to Zurich in 1760, where he worked as a piano and singing teacher and played the violin in the orchestra run by the Music Room Society. Walder did not move until 1774. He also worked as a piano teacher, and played cello in the same orchestra as his friend. From 1775 onwards, Walder and Egli together published several collections of songs under the title Choice Religious Songs; two of these are to be heard on this CD. Since the name of the composer is not given for the individual songs, we cannot know for certain which are by Egli, and which by Walder. As in the case of the songs of Bachofen and Schmidlin (with the exception of Schmidlin’s cantatas), certain verses have been omitted on this recording. The tendency at the time was to publish anything up to a dozen verses for a single song, though the lack of any narrative element makes it unnecessary to include them all. The music history of Zurich before 1800 has hitherto largely been ignored by historians as well as by practising musicians. The famous ban on music in the churches, though it lasted less than a century, has led to post-Reformation Zurich being considered something of a ‘land without music’. But outside the church, a musical life developed over the ensuing centuries to whose richness this CD bears witness. Should the reader wish to follow the rapid development of the Zurich music scene at the end of the 18th century, we recommend here two further CDs in the present series of ‘Music from the Zentralbibliothek Zürich’, namely of the music of Philipp Christoph Kayser (1755-1823) and Johann David Brünings (ca. 1770-1810?) on GMCD 7163 and of Anton Liste (1772-1832) on GMCD 7154. Dr. Chris Walton Page revised Wednesday May 09 2007 |
