In dich hab | ich gehoffet | herr. | H.S.M.
Zellerfeld Tablature Ze2
(Caspar Calvör, Braunschweig, 1668?)
The present verset on ‘In dich hab ich gehoffet, Herr’ is the first of a three- or four-
verset cycle that includes the three versets catalogued as WV 9 but should probably also include the manualiter fantasia catalogued as WV 8. Unusually for Scheidemann’s chorale versets, the present one presents not only the phrases of the chant melody, but between those phrases also engages in motivic fragmentation and interplay typical of the chorale motet, a genre cultivated in Protestant Germany around the turn of the seventeenth century. The melody is found in the bass voice, which also participates in the interplay with the other voices, presenting a question for performance practice. The manuscript source says nothing about the intended disposition of the music upon the instrument (whereas Verse 2 is specified to be played manualiter, Verse 3 pedaliter, and Verse 4 manualiter on two manuals), and the piece is perfectly playable on one manual alone; on the other hand, it is normal to play a chant melody in the bass or tenor on the pedal. In this case, should the pedal be used at all? or only for the plain statements of the phrases of the melody? (Both Fock’s and Beckmann’s editions, perhaps too readily, suggest this practice and no other; Beckmann, in what is surely an overreaching and unnecessary editorial intervention, prints
only the plain phrases of the chant on a third staff.) Or perhaps the pedal should double the melodic phrases while the entire piece is also played by the hands (a practice known in France and hinted at for other repertories by some modern commentators) – or the pedal should play the bass voice throughout, but (as suggested in a couple of sources of the period) a stop should be added for the plain phrases of the chant and retired otherwise? In this case I have chosen to play the bass in the pedal throughout.
The tune used here for ‘In dich hab ich gehoffet, Herr’ is derived from a late medieval one used for several texts, including a version of ‘Christ ist erstanden’. It is not the tune used for this text in the songbook most closely associated with Scheidemann, the 1604 Hamburg
Melodeyen Gesangbuch to which his father contributed, and the text does not appear at all in the one previous Hamburg collection published between 1560 and 1604. The stylistic traits noted above show this to be an early work; this text, and the use of this tune and this particular form thereof (essentially identical, for example, to that in a collection published in 1616 in Nürnberg, but different from that in a collection from Straßburg from the same year) – as well as the use of d' in the pedal, which Scheidemann clearly avoided in a number of cases presumably because it was not available at St Catharine’s before a certain date – suggest that Scheidemann may have been working in another area of Germany during the period between his studies in Amsterdam and his assumption of the St Catharine’s post. It should be said, however, that this is the tune used by Tunder presumably a few decades later.