Schutz heinrich biography of christopher

He wrote what is thought to be the first German opera , Dafne , performed at Torgau in , of which the music has since been lost. He was buried in the Dresden Frauenkirche but his tomb has since been destroyed. When Schutz was staying at the inn, his musical talents were discovered by Moritz von Hessen-Kassel in After being a choir -boy he went on to study law at Marburg before going to Venice from — to study music with Giovanni Gabrieli.

Heinrich Schutz: a Short

He subsequently had a short stint as organist at Kassel before moving to Dresden in to work as court composer to the Elector of Saxony. She produced two daughters before her death in Anna Justina born in and Euphrosyne born in In he was invited to Copenhagen to compose the music for wedding festivities there, eventually returning to Dresden in He again conducted an extended visit to Denmark in Schutz died in Dresden from a stroke in at the age of Additionally, the influence of the Netherlandish composers of the 16th century is prominent in his work.

His best known works are in the field of sacred music, ranging from solo voice with instrumental accompaniment to a cappella choral music. Practical considerations were certainly responsible for part of this change: the Thirty Years' War had devastated the musical infrastructure of Germany, and it was no longer practical or even possible to put on the gigantic works in the Venetian style which marked his earlier period.

His harmonies often result from the contrapuntal alignment of voices rather than from any sense of "harmonic motion"; contrastingly, much of his music shows a strong tonal pull when approaching cadences. His music includes a great deal of imitation , but structured in such a way that the successive voices do not necessarily enter after the same number of beats or at predictable intervallic distances.

Above all, his music displays extreme sensitivity to the accents and meaning of the text, which is often conveyed using special technical figures drawn from musica poetica , themselves drawn from or created in analogy to the verbal figures of classical rhetoric.