Psalmen Davids
Three Centuries of Sacred Song
May 1–3, 2026
Embedded within many of the world’s religious scriptures are bodies of sacred song. The Jewish Tanakh (and thus the Christian Bible) contains the Tehillim, the Book of Psalms. Vedic Hinduism counts among its great texts the Samaveda, a collection of melodic chants. The central text of Sikhism, the Guru Granth Sahib, is composed as a series of extended hymns, and the Pali Canon of Buddhism features a large collection of mantras meant to be chanted. Throughout the world, sacred scripture has been transmitted through song for millennia, imbuing its words with extra-semantic meaning.
Most familiar to us in the West are the Psalms, the basis of thousands of compositions since time immemorial, and attributed in large part to King David of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. These texts were purportedly sung in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem by two antiphonal choirs, and this antiphonal scoring has survived, though less universally over time, to the present day. Composers have continued to turn to these texts not only because of their theological weight but because of their extraordinary expressive range, from lamentation to exultation and from intimacy to grandeur.
Heinrich Schütz’s (1585–1672) Psalmen Davids of 1619 stands out as a landmark in this tradition. This monumental collection of 26 psalm settings reflects both his Lutheran engagement with these texts and the deep influence his teacher, Giovanni Gabrieli, had on his compositional style. Schütz’s settings are deeply colorful and spatially oriented, featuring multiple choirs in dialogue with each other, instruments woven into the vocal textures, and sensitive expressions of their dramatic texts. As he so often did in his other works, Schütz labored intensively to bring the images in these texts to life in sound.
We close our 2025–2026 season today with selections from Schütz’s collection in dialogue with other composers’ settings of some of these same texts. We thus bring our season to a close as we opened it in the fall—with brilliant, polychoral settings of the psalms from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. That concert drew primarily from the body of cori spezzati settings of Vespers psalms composed in northern Italy during the mid-16th century, the first flowering of the Venetian School. Schütz, born a century after the first generation of those composers, arguably represents the apotheosis of this movement, having taken up its mantle from Gabrieli. Tonight’s concert therefore brings our season full circle by presenting the German Baroque culmination of this Italian Renaissance movement.
We open our program with Schütz’s setting of Psalm 2, the source of the bass aria Why do the nations rage and several subsequent movements of Handel’s Messiah. Schütz depicts the seething turbulence of an unholy world through rapid, violent interplay between two contending choirs, reinforced by larger masses of voices and instruments. These forces converge into a wall of sound suggestive of the blind rage to which two opposing armies might build, and we are left to wonder if Schütz might have had the opening conflicts of the nascent Thirty Years’ War in his mind as he set this text. Reduced forces depict the unrighteous conspiracy to “throw off the bonds” of God and God’s subsequent laughter at the futility of these plans, and Schütz brilliantly varies textures and harmonic colors as the text turns from narrative to doctrine. The customary doxology that follows the psalm’s text begins sedately, though it gradually builds in texture and rhythmic complexity before finishing with a majestic “Amen”.
We then move to Felix Mendelssohn’s (1809–1847) setting of the same text, composed more than 200 years later, near the end of his tragically short life. Though separated by centuries, the similarities between these two settings are there to be uncovered. Most apparent are the similarities in scoring—much like Schütz’s setting, Mendelssohn’s employs two choirs in dialogue which, from time to time, give way to small corps of soloists. Mendelssohn also periodically borrows some of Schütz’s pungent harmonic changes, and his doxology likewise begins humbly and beautifully before growing to a climactic finish. With a less pictorial and more lyrical style, Mendelssohn more subtly evokes many of the same images as Schütz. On hand with us tonight, as you heard in our opening selection, is a band of instruments from the Jubilate Baroque Orchestra, and they will interject at various points during this setting.
Dramatically and compositionally, Psalm 100 is Psalm 2’s opposite—a short, self-assured psalm of praise. Both settings of this psalm on our program are likewise short and uplifting, though neither lacks variety or musical intrigue. Schütz’s setting, befitting the relative simplicity of the text, is scored for two equal four-voiced choruses. The two choirs trade rhythmically dynamic phrases in short, rapid-fire bursts, though these are punctuated by occasional respites of longer note values. The doxology that concludes this setting is more akin to Mendelssohn’s than any other such example on the program, its canonical, delicate, and transparent texture building inexorably to a climactic finish.
Its complement is sourced from another landmark collection by another singular composer, HaShirim asher l’Sh’lomo of Salamone Rossi (c. 1570–1630). Rossi’s life and career were defined in part by his relationship, as a Jew, with the upper echelons of contemporary Italian society. Overcoming the second-class citizenship to which his birth consigned him, he managed to find favor as a court musician to Duke Vincenzo I of Mantua. Rossi lived and worked during a time of great controversy within the Jewish communities of northern Italy, as these communities furiously debated whether and how to modernize worship in the synagogue. “We raise our voices on the festivals and sing songs of praise in the synagogue to honor God with compositions of vocal harmony,” wrote Rabbi Yehudah Mi-Modena, Rossi’s most prominent advocate. “A man stood up to chase us away, saying that it is not right to do so, because it is forbidden to rejoice, and that the singing of hymns and praises in harmony is forbidden. Although the congregation clearly enjoyed our singing, this man rose against us and condemned us publicly, saying that we had sinned before God!”
It was against this backdrop that Rossi composed the 33 polyphonic motets of HaShirim asher l’Sh’lomo, which translates as “The Songs of Solomon”—a clever pun on his own name. These motets demonstrate that Rossi had thoroughly imbibed the compositional style of his Catholic predecessors. Save for their Hebrew texts, they are scarcely distinguishable from the motets written by Palestrina or any of Rossi’s contemporaries who partook of the stile antico. His setting of Psalm 100 is a prime example: alternating sections of homophony and imitative polyphony periodically bring us to traditionally constructed cadences, and varying configurations of its five-voice texture (typical of late 16th-century writing) heighten the rhetorical power of the text before its climactic conclusion.
Schütz was a famously pragmatic composer—partly by necessity, as the Thirty Years’ War claimed more and more of his musicians as the conflict wound on—and he gave performers of his music explicit permission to take license with its performance. We exercise such license today, departing in several places from the practices Schütz probably intended, including in the next selection, his setting of Psalm 23. So flexible is Schütz’s writing that this piece, the first you will hear today scored for a small choir (the coro favorito) singing in a higher register and a larger group in a lower register, works well for a wide variety of forces. Today you will hear a quartet of soloists—sometimes reinforced by strings and a cornet—staffing the first group and a quartet of winds the second. As in other motets he wrote for this combination, Schütz reserves his most florid and pictorial melodies for the coro, while the second group periodically interjects to move the text and musical development forward.
Next up on our program are two settings of Psalm 84, which lovers of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem will recognize as the text of that work’s keystone movement. Schütz’s unusual setting of this text displays his expressive powers. Like the previous selection, it is scored for “high” and “low” choirs, though it easily surpasses it in harmonic and melodic richness. The first three chords of this motet form one of the most striking openings in Schütz’s entire output, and the setting never lets up, twisting and turning through unexpected modal shifts, extended imitative developments, dense canons at the unison, and a relatively rare episode of ensemble recitative. Fittingly, it likewise ends in unusual fashion through its omission of the customary doxology.
We then travel back in time once again to the late Renaissance for this motet’s complement, a setting by Jacobus Gallus (alias Jacob Handl, 1550–1591). Gallus’s music, like Rossi’s, embodies the sacred style of the late Renaissance, though it makes use of more pungent harmonic changes and a great deal more syncopation than that of his contemporaries, perhaps foreshadowing the greater expressiveness of the music of the following century. His Latin setting of Psalm 84 typifies this approach, with occasional harmonic surprises and long, drawn‑out phrases that frequently move perpendicularly to the prevailing tactus and textual stresses. True to the conventions of the day, however, both choirs, antiphonally trading verses of text for much of the piece, converge to close the first part of the motet (we omit the second part today). Perhaps the greatest curiosity of this setting is the appearance, during these closing cadences, of triplets in both bass parts—an extremely rare device for music of this era.
We close our concert, and our season, with the most exuberant piece on this program, Schütz’s setting of Psalm 136. This motet truly has it all: striking scoring, an unusual degree of harmonic complexity (for how little harmonic ground is covered), and a wealth of musical fireworks. In addition to the familiar coro favorito, capella, and continuo, this piece features a cantor, trio of trombones, and a corps of trumpets and drums, gamely staffed tonight by our cornettists. Schütz ingeniously gives musical voice to this unusually constructed psalm, with its interlinear refrain of “For his goodness endures forever”, by assigning that refrain to the capella, and their repetitions likewise endure (seemingly) forever—far beyond the text of the psalm proper. As the piece develops, these refrains accelerate and increase in manic energy until they dissolve into a whirl of polyphonic repetitions. Striking, too, is the stubborn harmony of C major to which these refrains nearly always revert—regardless of the surrounding content—making for several harmonic changes reminiscent of Schütz’s Psalm 84, though achieved in the opposite manner and deriving from clearly different textual motivations.
This wild, joyous whirlwind is a fitting way to close our concert and our season, and we hope we will see you in October for our presentation of Handel’s exquisite Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline. We thank you for your support this season, and we hope you will spread the word about CBS! We wish you a restful, refreshing, and musical summer, and look forward to seeing you in the fall as we kick off another season of great music.