Motet notes - Schütz

Several of the most important Latin language motets published in Schütz’ Cantiones Sacrae are to texts of St Augustine.  These Augustinian works are among the most heavily chromatic and colored in all of Schütz.  Our large three-section work, Aspice pater, (SWV 73-75) has a veiled melancholy and warmth learned not from his teacher Gabrieli but from the madrigalists, Marenzio and Monteverdi. Its chromaticism is melancholy, but it contains the heightened sensitivity to shades of meaning that characterizes other Augustinian works like the Passion Motets.

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