Oakeley, Sir Herbert (Stanley)

Opitz, Martin

Opitz outlined German poetics in his treatise Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624) and provided poetic examples of these rules in his Teutsche Poemata (also 1624), the first edition of which he subsequently revised according to the new rules set forth in his poetics. Opitz is widely regarded as the father of modern German poetry. He received the patent of nobility in 1627 and was made a member of the foremost German literary society, the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, in 1629.

The prime musical interest of Opitz’s texts lies in the insistence on a correspondence between natural word stress and metrical stress, which produced poetry that was natural, graceful and readily set to music. His poems were set by many 17th-century composers, including Heinrich Schütz, for whom he provided the libretto of Dafne (Breslau, 1627), a German paraphrase of Rinuccini’s work set by Jacopo Peri. Performed at a Saxon court festival on 13/23 April 1627, Dafne is widely regarded as the first opera in the German language; the music is no longer extant. Opitz’s libretto may have served as a model for another Dafne, by M.G. Peranda and G.A. Bontempi, which was performed at the Dresden court in 1671.

Opitz’s Judith (Breslau, 1635), a reworking of Andrea Salvadori’s Italian text for Marco da Gagliano, has frequently been associated with Schütz’s name, since Opitz undertook the translation after the collaboration on Dafne; however, Schütz never set this three-act libretto. In 1646 another version of Opitz’s Judith was published in Rostock, expanded to five acts by Andreas Tscherning with its choruses set to music by Matthias Apelles von Löwenstern, Kapellmeister to the Duke of Oels. In Dansktalende Judith (1666), Mogens Skeel translated Opitz’s Judith into Danish in connection with a court performance in Copenhagen; it is not known if this version was performed with music.

A hunting song, ‘Auff Ihr Jäger auff! Es tagt’, with text by Opitz, was inserted into Johann Lauremberg’s second pair of musical dramas published as Zwo Comoedien and performed during the Danish royal wedding celebrations of 1634. It has been shown that this hunting song is based on the chorus of shepherds from Act 3 of Dafne. In the ballet performed at the Danish wedding six strophes from Opitz’s Galathee (1621) reappear in the ‘Klageliedt des Orpheus’, whose fifth strophe begins ‘Täglich geht die Sonne nieder’. The Schütz Werke Verzeichnis lists among the lost works three secular songs which can be attributed to Opitz: ‘Ach liebste, lass uns eilen’, ‘Gehet, meine Seufzer, hin’ and ‘Täglich geht die Sonne unter’. This last must be considered a Schütz composition used at the Danish royal nuptials of 1634 and strengthens the assertions that Schütz did, in fact, compose the secular music for this wedding. Opitz can be considered to have provided the greatest share of secular texts set to music by Schütz; other composers who set his secular songs include Heinrich Albert, C.C. Dedekind, Caspar Kittel, J.E. Kindermann and Johann Nauwach.

Opitz’s translations of biblical texts were also influential for composers such as Albert, Andreas Hammerschmidt, Jacob Hintze, Kindermann and Schütz. His translation of the Huguenot Psalter, which was meant to replace that of Ambrosius Lobwasser, found only limited popularity, however. Both Opitz and Lobwasser translated the French psalms of Marot and de Bèze into patterns identical to the originals and set to Goudimel’s original music. Opitz demonstrated great care for the musical setting of the texts, and his rendering subtly fits the borrowed tunes. Opitz based several collections of psalms and epistles on French originals so that they could be sung to the same Geneva tunes. Hammerschmidt composed a series of dialogues on Opitz’s paraphrase of the Song of Songs; they make up the first 11 numbers in Hammerschmidt’s Geistlicher Dialogen ander Teil (Dresden, 1645).

A critical edition of Opitz’s works is in progress: G. Schulz-Behrend, ed: Martin Opitz Gesammelte Werke, Kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart, 1968–).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MARA R. WADE