Ich ruff zu dir | Herr Jesu Christ |

Johann Peters. 
Lübbenau MS LyA1

  Cantica Sacr: |

  Ich ruff zu dir | herr Jesu Christ: ||

  Jo: Pet: Sch:
Budapest Tablature Bártfa 27

One of Sweelinck’s finest sacred variation works is a setting of ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’. The melody of this early Reformation religious song, heard entire in each variation, provides not only a shapely framework but also the source of much of the work’s motivic content.  Sweelinck uses varied rhythmic figures, larger and smaller note durations and intervals, chromaticism (use of notes outside the basic scale used in the piece), and other means to reflect and portray in some detail the author’s words, a prayer of trust in the grace of God.

This work presents some interesting questions regarding its realization on the organ. Scholar Pieter Dirksen (1) assumes this is an organ work because it is based on a sacred song, (2) assumes the cantus firmus in the inner verses is to be played in the pedal, i.e. on a separate stop from the other parts, because of a number of voice-crossings between the cantus and an adjacent voice, and (3) adduces some evidence that, although the manual part extends below, and the supposed pedal part extends above, the ranges of the organs normally available to the composer, certain other instruments known to Sweelinck would have accommodated this work.

(3) is certainly possible. However, carefully notated rests interrupting the cantus firmus when another voice crosses it (as in a version of Sweelinck’s ‘Erbarm dich mein’ adapted for manualiter performance; see the notes for that work), and the lack of any indication for the use of the pedal in the sole manuscript source (which does explicitly notate a pedal part in what we may take to be the definitive version of ‘Erbarm dich mein’), suggest that (2) is not a valid assumption, and indeed to observe these rests in a pedaliter performance, where they are unnecessary, verges on the absurd. It is also significant that at both points where the melody is interrupted, the text refers directly or indirectly to the hand of God – ‘create [schaff, cognate with English ‘shape’] in me a new heart’; ‘thou hast all things in thine hand’ – with the possible implication that the melody has been momentarily ‘handed off ’ to God. Given the range issue, and setting aside the idea of pedaliter performance of the tenor cf, (1) becomes less certain. As it comes to us, the work seems clearly to be a manualiter one, seems plausible to be played on a single manual (the unisons in bicinia which Dirksen sees as indications for two-manual performance, I see instead as tidy dovetails – much tidier than the unisons in other textures, which cannot usually be played on separate manuals even if desired), and indeed seems equally at home on the harpsichord, whose domestic or chamber associations are not out of place for such a personal text as ‘Ich ruf zu dir’ (which I think is the only early Lutheran religious song cast in the first person singular), and on which, in the aforementioned places where the melody is interrupted, the sound of the melodic note has usually already died away, so that there is less sense of interruption than with the sustained tone of the organ. In any case, although manual and registration changes are possible to some extent, the text does not particularly suggest changes in timbre from one stanza to the next, and I have recorded the work on one manual and one registration throughout.

A moment ago I alluded to text painting with regard to the ‘hand of God’. Julia Dokter, in an important article, ‘Musical rhetoric in Sweelinck’s sacred keyboard variations’, in the Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis (Vol. 61, No. 1/2 [2011]), ‘cracked the code’ of Sweelinck’s sacred variation works, demonstrating convincingly that in a number of cases the given set of variations should be prefaced by a relatively simple setting representing the first stanza of text (as the composer himself provided in the case of ‘Allein Gott’),* and that there is a good deal of text-painting to be found in Sweelinck’s settings once the text and music have thus been aligned properly. 

Both this ever-changing surface and the much more balanced structure of the four variations demonstrate Sweelinck’s genius; as Dirksen has largely shown, that structure shows very careful ordering that is 
·   cumulative (number of voices [2 > 3 > 3 > 4],
 which also means [more > less] active motion), 
·   balanced (certain pairwise parallels [1 || 3] and [2 || 4];
 others [1 || 2] and [3 || 4]), 
·   symmetrical (melody in the [treble / tenor : tenor / treble] octave), and
·   cyclical (melody in the [highest / lowest / middle / highest] voice, 

which also means the melody is [most / less / least / most] prominent

and the total range is [low / high / medium / low]).

*  In this case I have supplied the four-voice harmonization, with melody in the treble, by Heinrich Scheidemann’s father, David, as found in the 1604 Hamburg Melodeyen Gesangbuch (MG), which (pace Dokter) is more likely than Eler’s 1588 Psalmi Martini Lutheri to have been Sweelinck’s source, as the form of melody in MG exactly matches that in Sweelinck’s setting (and the questions of passing-tones and of extra syllables in the Low German dealt with in Dokter’s analysis thus disappear); Sweelinck’s North German students were quite closely connected to MG; and I suspect the Amsterdam master had little reason to be concerned with, perhaps even had little knowledge of, Lutheran songs such as this one before he began teaching North German organists and writing for the organ sometime after 1600 (as Dirksen suggests).
program notes
