The first half of the German seventeenth century was a time and place of short men with well-tended facial hair. The prevailing style dictated long, groomed mustaches and goatees tucked against starched ruffs that rode up to the ears. The Sun King was not yet on the throne across the Rhine in France and the wig was not yet in. Expressive locks still flamed and frizzed on top. Celebrated for their skill at piloting their age’s most advanced technology more sophisticated than siege machines, the organists of Germany commanded armies of thrilling sonorities with their fingers and feet. They were stylish and intrepid musketeers of music, dashing and devout.
It was in just such flamboyant guise that Samuel Scheidt had himself pictured in the engraved portrait that adorns the Tabulatura nova (the new tablature) for organ published in 1624. When bound together, its three parts were about as big and heavy as a one-volume encyclopedia. The behemoth was too massive to put on the music desk of any organ or harpsichord. Not directly to be played from, the Tabulatura nova was instead to be consulted and studied. In his explanatory notes that reveal much about the innovative keyboard practices and techniques that he pioneered, Scheidt acknowledged that his German organist colleagues would have to transcribe the publication’s open score (in which the four polyphonic parts of soprano, alto, tenor and bass were each presented on their own separate staff) into the then-standard letter notation. This common practice of writing music, one which appears to most of Scheidt’s modern musical descendants like indecipherable Gothic scribblings, was known as German organ tablature. Scheidt’s more proudly universal system, however impractical for performance, staked out new territory in the unexplored territory of the keyboard world. His was the music of the “Age of Discovery”—Tabulatura nova as terra incognito, an atlas, and encyclopedia.
Tabulatura nova is a veritable lexicon of keyboard knowledge and innovation. Its music is rigorous and research-driven but also, at times, capricious and witty. Scheidt makes use of the inexhaustible algorithms of invention to generate seemingly endless permutations not only in his high-minded polyphonic fantasias but also in his creative and demanding treatment of popular tunes of the day, sneaking ingenious polyphonic tricks behind the glittering façade of exuberant technical display.
The collection contains a vast range of forms and effects of newly invented virtuosic gestures that included phrasing—a seemingly subtle but still revolutionary development. The organs of Scheidt’s time, many of which he had inspected, hosted a huge range of new sounds imitating the other instruments of the day: viols, cornettos, dulcians, trumpets, recorders, and many others. This diversity inspired Scheidt to teach his fingers to imitate the performing styles of these other instrumentalists. His introduction of the slur to keyboard playing was an attempt to achieve the expressive subtlety of the best string players. Why shouldn’t organists, whose default touch was to separate each successive note in a kind of perpetual non-legato, try to mimic these varied groupings?
With painstaking notational specificity, Scheidt expanded the shadings and shapes of keyboard touch even to included smeared over-legato, as if the fingers had been dipped in honey. He extended this acoustic research out into architectural spaces like that of the vast church of St. Mary’s in his hometown of Halle, Saxony, in central Germany, where he served as organist already as a teenager. The sonic shifts and investigations of Scheidt’s Echo: ad manual duplex forte& lente (Echo for two manuals, soft and loud of his like) are curious, even obsessive, but also illuminating and uplifting. Though famed for his fast fists, Scheidt rarely rushed to get results.
In 1607, Scheidt, then in his early twenties, had been sent by the Halle city fathers to Amsterdam for two years to learn from the “maker of organists,” Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Echoes, variations and, most importantly, counterpoint were all on the expansive pedagogical program. Scheidt took tunes and technique from his teacher and pushed them to new and broader dimensions: homage by one-upmanship is everywhere in the Tabulatura nova.
Composer of big pieces (as well as a few less demanding, lighter keyboard dances), Scheidt was short by modern standards—5’5” if he was average height. His music not only leaves fleeting traces of his body in the flights and figures traced by the hands—the shimmering repeated notes for which he provides specific alternating fingerings, quaking tremolos, soaring runs, knuckle-busting double thirds and sixths in one hand, chordal leaps, and groovy syncopations—but also maps out the contortions of his entire frame.
German organists prided themselves on managing dense contrapuntal textures with all their four limbs engaged at once. Among the Europeans, only they deployed their legs fully at the wide pedalboards connected to massive ranks of towering pipes. The Germans even brought both feet into action at the same time, as Scheidt magisterially demonstrates at the end of the Tabulatura nova in a pair of valedictory pieces for full organ and six polyphonic parts, two of them to be played simultaneously on the pedals. Scheidt cautions the composer of such works not to exceed the span of an octave in the feet because his diminutive brethren wouldn’t be able to reach the span and perhaps fall off the bench in the attempt.
In his Modus ludendi pleno Organo pedaliter (A way of playing on the full organ with the pedal), Scheidt holds faithfully to his recommendations except at one moment where he transgresses the octave limit, the left foot clinging tenuously to the lowest D on the pedal board as the right then stretches up a minor third to achieve the yawning width of a tenth, the organist clinging to the high bench with his backside while his hands seek balancing purchase from the manuals. Not just at its conclusion is Scheidt’s three-volume compendium as much a physical as a mental test: mens et manus, mind and hands — et pedus, and feet.
The publication of the Tabulatura nova was a lavish and expensive undertaking financed by Scheidt himself with funds inherited from his wealthy father, city beer steward and inspector of wells in Halle. Konrad Scheidt’s work was not musical, but it made a certain, familiar sense that, thanks to the tremendous educational system built around music in the Lutheran Latin Schools of the era, the boy would become one of the leading organists of his generation. Both father and son were experts in fluid dynamics. They knew how to brew and let flow those two vital, very German products—the liquid gold of beer and that invisible magic of the air, music. It was no coincidence that at organ dedications—at many of which Samuel Scheidt participated as inspector, performer, and fellow feaster—the amount of beer equal to the volume of the new instrument’s largest pipe had to be supplied by town officials for festive communal consumption.
The Tabulatura nova was both a feast and a cornerstone: nourishing and foundational, built to last yet also to be fed on down the generations. I held Scheidt’s personal copy of the collection in his native Halle in 1989 when that city, then one of the most polluted in the world, still lay behind the Iron Curtain. Hefting the Tabulatura nova in the GDR felt then like lifting an ingot of Eastern Bloc steel. Vast cities of counterpoint and figuration could be constructed from its raw materials.
Two-and-a-half centuries after the publication of Scheidt’s magnum opus, the recently united Germany set about patriotically claiming and curating the new nation’s musical past. It is hardly surprising that in 1892 Scheidt’s Tabulatura nova was anointed to be the first volume of the Denkmäler der Deutschen Tonkunst (Monuments of German Tone-Art, i.e., Music), the series’ advisory committee presided over by Johannes Brahms, by then sporting a long gray beard rather than the suave goatee of his German musical ancestors. The organists of the new Germany could now play from this large, but far from lightweight, volume, since this modern edition of the Tabulatura nova was printed on two practical staves instead of Scheidt’s daunting four. The metaphor chosen to describe this monument was biological rather than industrial: future generations of German organists would admire, even emulate, this music—a mighty oak whose “greening branches” were nourished by deep roots in native soil.
Aside from his sojourn in Amsterdam, Scheidt spent his life in the city of his birth. Yet he published the Tabulatura nova in Hamburg, then Germany’s largest city. The cataclysm of the Thirty Years’ War, which in some regions of Germany like that around Halle decimated as much as half the population, had broken out in 1618. The war was more than a confessional conflict, although religious affiliation in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation was a decisive factor. The administrator of the Lutheran archbishop, which encompassed Halle, was Christian Wilhelm, the Margrave of Brandenburg; he was not even a Lutheran but a Calvinist. The war had as much, if not more, to do with who would acquire the wealth generated by these ecclesiastical units than it did with tenets of belief. Along with the Saxon Elector Johann Georg, the Margrave was the dedicatee of the Tabulatura nova. In general, the Lutheran powers hated Calvinists more than the enemy Catholics. Yet here on Scheidt’s title page, printed sumptuously in both black and red ink, the famed organist embraced a Calvinist Prince.
Scheidt’s opening music is carefully chosen: a setting of Martin Luther’s hymn Wir glauben all an einen Gott (We all believe in one good), the Reformer’s paraphrase of the Creed first published exactly a hundred years earlier in 1524. Scheidt’s almost austere contrapuntal elaboration of the venerable melody is a clarion call, or perhaps a shot heard, if not round the world, then across far-flung German-speaking lands ravaged by war. Ringing down the centuries from, and to, a world in turmoil, this music can also be heard now as a call for tolerance, though others might see “A Mighty Fortress” rise up from its sheer wall of sound.
The year after the publication of the Tabulatura nova, Imperial troops marched into Halle and Christian Wilhelm fled the city. Taken by enemy forces during the horrific sacking of Magdeburg, the archiepiscopal seat, six years later, in 1631, the wounded Margrave was nursed back to health by Jesuits and converted to Catholicism. He still believed in the same God.
The war destroyed Scheidt’s wealth, yet he soldiered on in Halle, publishing and performing vocal music for reduced forces. Two years after the war ended with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, he produced a final volume of chorales; shorter and less erudite than those in the Tabulatura nova; these pieces could be played by village organists and pious amateurs at home.
A virtuoso on the loudest keyboard instrument (the organ), Scheidt was also renowned for his abilities at the softest (the clavichord). In a diary entry of June 22nd, 1636, another lesser potentate, Christian II, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg, could not contain his superlatives: “I had the world-famous Music Director and Organist, Samuel Scheidt, brought to me. He played extraordinarily sweetly on the clavichord and I have never in my entire life heard anything like it.”
That performance by Scheidt came just past the halfway point of the Thirty Years’s War. Early in his diary and in the war, Christian II had grieved that it was his “fatal destiny” to fight in the great conflict. The Tabulatura nova stands as a monument—perhaps hopeful, perhaps unyielding—to that same fatal destiny, one shared by Scheidt. He died in 1654 “in summa miseria et pauperitate”: in utter misery and poverty. The city of Halle covered the costs of the cheapest possible rate for his burial in a common grave.
Scheidt’s money was gone but not his trust in God, as the psalm text to the intricate canon that adorns his portrait in the Tabulatura nova affirms. That musical puzzle is deciphered by Scheidt at the end of the collection’s first volume, its theme re-used by him to launch and increasingly animate the sprawling Toccata super: In te Domine speravi that closes out the collection’s second installment. As the Toccata proceeds from stately composure to unbounded joy, the diminutive man plays on, larger than life, his music both an echo of, and a triumph over, war and death.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
Great to read this and to listen to the Rami recordings. Good to be charmed.