Jan Dismas Zelenka: Psalmi Vespertini I.

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The usual cycle of five psalms for Vespers of a Confessor (Vesperae de Confessore) comprises the psalms Dixit Dominus (ps. 109); Confitebor tibi Domine (ps. 110); Beatus vir (ps. 111); Laudate pueri (ps. 112); Laudate Dominum (ps. 116), and the canticle Magnificat. According to the dates Zelenka wrote into the scores, at least five of these seven large-scale works were composed in a span of less than three months during the final quarter of 1725. To this cycle Zelenka added his revised version of a De profundis setting (ZWV 50) originally composed in 1724 for the exequies he had requested to be held in Dresden after learning of the death of his father. Particular verses from certain psalms drew almost identical schemes of musical action from composers of this era, including Zelenka. Known as Szenen, these enclosed dramatic episodes are found at specific points in certain psalm settings. They are musical-dramatic plans built up with a sequence of subsections in which a number of diverse elements are heard in close proximity. In Zelenka’s psalm settings these include great pauses and silences, tempo alterations, changes of metre, use of the stile concitato, short fugal expositions, and conglomerations of fantastic harmonic progressions. Unfortunately, when these settings were entered into the music catalogue of Dresden’s Court chapel as ‘33. Psalmi. insieme’ in 1765, only 23 of the original 33 settings were preserved. Although each score once was accompanied by sets of parts, today these are mainly missing from the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Dresden, the home to so much of Zelenka’s musical legacy. Finally, while it has become usual to categorize Zelenka’s greatest compositions as coming from either the early 1720s or the final incomplete cycle of six Masses, a re-evaluation of Zelenka’s Vespers settings from the second half of the 1720s leads to the conclusion that this was not simply an era in which he was producing everyday functional music on a grand scale. On the contrary, this was an epoch of exceptional artistic value in the output of Jan Dismas Zelenka.