‘The Orpheus of Amsterdam’
The Life and Work of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck

This verse by the seventeenth-century poet Jacobus Revius refers to the one major event in the life of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) that is not associated with the city of Amsterdam, namely his birth in Deventer. In his day this internationally famed composer, organist, expert in organ building and teacher was rightly praised as the ‘Orpheus of Amsterdam’, the city where he lived from his boyhood and where he played the organ in the Oude Kerk from around 1577 until his death. Jan actually succeeded his father in that position and his son Dirck Janszoon in turn inherited it from him, so that this important musical post was held by three generations of Sweelincks, over a period of almost a century (1564-1652).

Jan Pieterszoon, who later added his mother's surname to this patronymic, can be seen as the last great representative of two centuries of European dominance by what is known as ‘Netherlandish polyphony’. His contribution to both instrumental and vocal music was outstanding, particularly if we consider that his predecessors and contemporaries concentrated mainly on the religious and secular repertoire for the human voice. Thanks to the flourishing music printing industry, his vocal works enjoyed a wide circulation. His keyboard music, though, survived only in manuscript, showing that this repertoire was still overshadowed by vocal music. However, thanks to Sweelinck's fame as a teacher at home and abroad and, of course, to the exceptional quality of his work, instrumental music in general gradually grew in importance; it was the beginning of a triumphant progress that was to continue into the seventeenth century.

Sweelinck is a typical exponent of the Dutch municipal musical culture within the religious context of the Reformation. Whilst in other regions such as the Catholic Southern Netherlands the practice of music was ‘directed’ mainly by the Court and the Church, in the Calvinist North it was the municipal magistrates, the burgomasters and the municipal ‘parliament’ (the

so-called ‘vroedschap’ or ‘city fathers’) who were responsible for artistic and cultural life. So as an organist at the Oude Kerk, Sweelinck was also a civil servant employed by the city's Calvinist administration. We can judge what this meant from his duties; these consisted not so much in enriching the liturgical services with organ music - as was the case in the Catholic south - but in giving a kind of public concert twice a day. Since the Calvinists had largely banished music from their services, the church building became a concert hall. This was the background against which most of Sweelinck's keyboard works originated. They were often performed not only on the organ, but also on the harpsichord, an extremely popular household instrument at the time. Indeed, the living room was a lively centre for part-song: family members and friends would gather round the table, especially after the midday meal, to perform religious motets or psalms, secular French chansons and Italian madrigals. So Sweelinck's contribution to vocal music concentrates on these genres, which also found a ready market in the flourishing ‘collegia musica’, or ‘musical guilds’, organisations of (highly skilled) amateurs who met every week to make music under the direction of a professional musician.

Sweelinck's work illustrates extremely well the diversity of musical life at the beginning of the Golden Age. Despite the blossoming of the arts at the end of the sixteenth century and in the early decades of the seventeenth and the presence of many extremely good musicians, Sweelinck's productivity, versatility and the superior quality of his oeuvre make him unique in the Netherlands.

Music for man

He made his mark in the field of the polyphonic French chanson, which reached a last peak of brilliance in the second half of the sixteenth century, thanks, among others, to Orlandus Lassus. In 1594, the year of Lassus' death, in Antwerp Pierre Phalèse published a collection of chansons for five voices entitled Chansons... de M. Iean Svvelingh organiste, et Cornille Verdonq nouvellement composées ..., consisting of eighteen works by Sweelinck and four by his contemporary Cornelius Verdonck, then a singer with Philip ii's celebrated ‘capilla flamenca’ in Madrid, who later lived and worked in Antwerp. Sweelinck proved right from the outset that he was a composer who had fully mastered current compositional techniques and at the same time followed the latest stylistic developments within the genre. On the one hand, he demonstrated his command - taken almost for granted in a composer from the Low Countries - of imitative counterpoint, in which all parts are equally involved in the presentation of the musical material. At the same time, his chansons betray the then ubiquitous influence of the Italian madrigal, in which particular attention was paid to the expressive rendition of the text. Yet Sweelinck's approach to the text remained fairly reserved. For example, he attempted none of the chromatic experiments that were coming into vogue at the time. Nor, in his own madrigals, did he succumb to the exuberant ‘irregularities’ preferred by some Italians, and in particular by the Neapolitan Carlo Gesualdo and to some extent also the young Claudio Monteverdi. This somewhat conservative, though certainly not inferior, approach is characteristic of the madrigal in the Netherlands in general.

Knowing the rather old-fashioned tastes of his public, in his numerous, highly-popular Antwerp publications Pierre Phalèse concentrated on more traditional madrigal compositions, such as the early works of Luca Marenzio. It is abundantly clear from his Rimes françoises et italiennes for two and three voices, published by the Leiden branch of the Antwerp firm Plantin in 1612, that Sweelinck was familiar with Phalèse's publications. A few of the madrigals are adaptations of existing compositions by, for instance, Marenzio and Andrea Gabrieli. These arrangements for just two or three voices were very popular in amateur circles. Sweelinck probably drew inspiration from the work of the polyphonist Jean de Castro from the Southern Netherlands, the top ‘specialist’ in, mainly, three-part arrangements of chansons and madrigals. Phalèse published numerous collections by him from 1569 onwards and they remained in great demand until well into the seventeenth century.

Music for God

In his religious music Sweelinck concentrated on two target groups: the members of the Dutch Reformed Church with his polyphonic settings of the French Geneva Psalter (four books of Pseaumes de David, published in Amsterdam and Haarlem between 1604 and 1621), and the still numerous Catholics in the North with his Latin motets, published in the Catholic stronghold of Antwerp (Cantiones Sacrae, 1619). Though Sweelinck converted to the new doctrine once the Calvinists assumed power in 1578 (he may have had no choice in the matter), he was not unsympathetic to his former Catholic faith. In fact, a relative religious tolerance prevailed and we know that Sweelinck's circle of friends did not include religious fanatics.

Sweelinck's Geneva psalms, in which he set Clement Marot's and Theodore de Bèze's translations to music based on the original monophonic melodies by Louis Bourgeois, form the absolute culmination of a development that had begun in the 1540s. Possibly he chose the French translations rather than the Dutch, which were also available, because the French repertoire was widely known in the Netherlands (especially the polyphonic adaptations by Claude Goudimel, one of the victims of the infamous St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and Claude Lejeune), and also because the Dutch translations were poetically very weak. In the Latin motets of 1619, his ‘opus ultimum’ (the final part of his French psalms appeared posthumously), Sweelinck showed in particular that ‘classical’ polyphony, based on imitative counterpoint and madrigalian expression, had lost none of its power, despite the growing European success of the ‘modern’ Italian style, the socalled ‘accompanied monody’ in which a single voice, with instrumental accompaniment, carries the musical structure. However, these innovations only penetrated the Netherlands very slowly. The Pathodia sacra et profana, by the polymath Constantijn Huygens, published in Paris in 1647, is a good example of this Italian influence.

Pioneering in Perfection

Sweelinck's madrigals, of course, showed a marked Italian influence; but so also did his instrumental music, especially in the fantasias and the toccatas.

The fantasias, including the brilliantly conceived Fantasia chromatica, usually elaborate on a single theme which is ingeniously surrounded by everchanging contrapuntal motifs and is itself manipulated using augmentatio and diminutio, increasing or diminishing the note values, techniques which Sweelinck employed with great skill to build a climax. The toccatas are extensive improvisations in which virtuoso ostentation alternates with more contrapuntal passages, which betray the Dutch heritage. The works of the Venetian San Marco organists, such as Andrea Gabrieli and Claudio Merulo, may have been his models, but the influence of the English virginalists is also very apparent. With virtuoso keyboard composers like John Bull, William Byrd and Peter Philips, English keyboard music flourished as never before around the turn of the century. Sweelinck was a personal friend of Bull and Philips, whose Catholic convictions had forced them to flee to the Southern Netherlands. In 1593 Philips travelled to Amsterdam ‘only to sie and heare an excellent man of his faculties’, undoubtedly a reference to Sweelinck. The English influence is particularly noticeable in his variations on secular songs (Est-ce Mars, Ick voer al over Rhijn, Mein junges Leben hat ein End’, etc.).

But it was especially with his variations on chorales and Gregorian chant (Ich ruf zu dir Herr Jesu Christ, Ons is gheboren een kindekijn, Da pacem Domine, etc.) that Sweelinck made history. His chorale adaptations began a tradition which spread to Northern and Central Germany, in particular, and eventually culminated in Johann Sebastian Bach's unsurpassed contribution to the chorale repertoire for organ. Sweelinck's name is in fact very much associated with his fame as a teacher: German organists in particular came to study under him. The most important of these were Samuel Scheidt and Johann Scheidemann, both masters of the chorale variation; they were taken as models by Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel, the very two composers who paved the way for Bach. Hence the inestimable historical importance of Sweelinck's instrumental work. He may not have been a true innovator, certainly not in vocal music. But he perfected a number of genres, and in instrumental music in particular he laid the groundwork for the lasting success of keyboard music in the baroque. His oeuvre does not overwhelm with spectacular dramatic effects, but, like seventeenth-century Dutch art in general, it excels because of ‘a loving cultivation of detail, picturesque representation and mathematically contrived balance’, as the Sweelinck authority Frits Noske aptly expressed it. Consequently, - and I quote the last line of Noske's very worthwhile monograph on the composer - ‘his genius does not reveal itself spontaneously; it is disclosed only by dint of insight and knowledge’. The year 2000, when the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death is being widely commemorated, would seem an appropriate time to re-evaluate one of the pioneers who prepared the way for Bach's monumental art; not only because of Sweelinck's historical importance, but equally because of the undeniable merit of his music.

 

ignace bossuyt

Translated by Alison Mouthaan-Gwillim.

Further reading

Edition of Sweelinck's

Opera omnia. Amsterdam, 1957 -.

Noske, Frits, Sweelinck (Oxford Studies of Composers, 22). Oxford, 1988, reprinted in paperback 1989 (with an extensive bibliography).

Discography

Gustav Leonhardt, J.P. Sweelinck, Organ Works (dhm 05472 774342). Netherlands Chamber Choir (various conductors), J.P. Sweelinck. Choral Works, 3 vols (nm Classics 92003; 92010 and 92015)

Trinity College Chapel Choir (conducted by R. Marlow), J.P. Sweelinck, Cantiones Sacrae, 2 vols (Hyperion cda 67103-104).