AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

176 sunday morning AMS Philadelphia 2009
SALVe regiNA/SALVe rex CHriSte: THE LUTHERAN
APPROPRIATION OF THE MARIAN ANTIPHONS IN
THE ERA OF NEW PIETY (NEUE FRöMMIGKEIT)
Mary E. Frandsen
University of Notre Dame
Between c. 1640 and 1700, musical settings of the four Marian antiphons, particularly the
Salve regina, with texts that had been “de-Marianized” and re-addressed to Christ, assumed a
significant presence in the Lutheran repertoire. While the practice of altering these supplicatory
Marian texts to bring them into conformity with the Lutheran view of Christ as the sole
mediator dates back at least to Seybald Heyden’s 1523 revision of the Salve regina (as Salve Jesu
Christe, rex misericordiae), and altered texts circulated in northern hymnals into the 1560s,
the most intense Lutheran engagement with these antiphons, albeit in modified form, occurred
more than a century after the Reformation. In the context of a larger study on music
and Lutheran devotion, I have identified nearly eighty such works, both extant and lost. The
vast majority of these are revisions of the Salve regina, which required substitute phrases in
just four lines, while the other three texts necessitated extensive rewriting. Examples appear
in anthologies of Italian music published for the Lutheran market by Ambrosius Profe (1641,
1646, 1649) and Johann Havemann (1659), in Matthias Weckmann’s manuscript anthology
of sacred vocal music, Lüneburg KN 206 (c. 1647), in the Düben, Grimma, Luckau, and
Bokemeyer collections, and in numerous inventories of lost collections (where they may often
be identified through their title incipits). The majority of these de-Marianized pieces are
motets and sacred concertos by seventeenth-century Italian Catholic composers, beginning
with Monteverdi and Grandi, but a few settings of the revised texts by Lutherans (such as
Capricornus) also appear.
At first glance, this appropriation of settings of such cherished Catholic texts smacks of
confessional politics, and suggests that Lutherans sought to present these de-Marianized pieces
in public liturgies as assertions of doctrinal superiority. I will argue, however, that these
works have far more to do with Lutheran spirituality than with confessionalism. As I will
show, they appear as part of the musical response to a development in seventeenth-century
Lutheran spiritual life known to church historians as “new piety” (neue Frömmigkeit), which
was marked by the cultivation of an intense life of prayer and meditation as well as a mystically-infused
devotion to Christ. During the era of new piety (c. 1620–1680), Lutherans authored
hundreds of devotional manuals, prayer books, sermons, and new hymns, and also developed
a considerable body of sacred art music with Christocentric devotional texts—some 700 to
800 pieces—much of which they borrowed directly (without textual intervention) from the
contemporary Catholic repertoire. Thus it seems that Lutherans of this era employed these
de-Marianized pieces—indeed, sought them out—chiefly as musically-rendered prayers of
supplication to Christ. In the broader devotional repertoire cultivated by Lutherans, these
pieces offered a contrast with the settings of rapturous expressions of adoration for Christ and
ardent appeals for mystical union with Him that the Lutherans also prized.