Four centuries dead, and yet Sweelinck, the greatest composer of the Netherlands, will outlive us too
Which man is behind the greatest Dutch composer, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck? Four hundred years after his death, harpsichordist and organist Tineke Steenbrink (44) and journalist Botte Jellema went looking for their podcast. Sweelinck Now for Radio4. “It resulted in a search for something that is not there, the pursuit of a shadow”, Tineke Steenbrink sighed.
Her colleague – and Sweelinck biographer – Pieter Dirksen (60) and singer Harry van der Kamp (74) do the same. Their studies of the enigmatic genius span almost half a century. And sometimes they rediscover, a fragment about the composer, in life the Eighty Years’ War between life Spain and the nascent Dutch Calvinism. At the time, many thought it was better to remain invisible. An advice that Sweelinck seems to have taken to heart.
“There is no document in which he is reprimanded,” says Dirksen. “That remains to perpetuate for a man who continued to struggle in a period. Apparently everyone admired him and Sweelinck navigated cleverly between all the religious quarrels.” “In fact, I think he wanted to reconcile those opposing forces,” says Jacob Lekkerkerker (46).
Mild and determined
Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was born in Deventer. The year of his birth is still disputed, although Dirksen now thinks he knows for sure that it is 1561. Three years later, the family moved to Amsterdam, where father got the job as organ of the main city church, St Nicholas.
As a five-year-old toddler, Sweelinck witnessed the iconoclasm. His father died six years later, and at about sixteen the young organist was given a tenure in his father’s church; then a Catholic bastion. But the bureaux de change fluctuated constantly. Five years later, the resulting Amsterdam had to hand over power to the Protestants. They initially wanted to tear down the church organs, but the city council agreed. Amsterdam arrange to pay Sweelinck, as the new religion did not allow instruments during the service. Only beforehand was the organ even supposed to massage the psalm melodies into the ears of the faithful and afterwards Sweelinck would escort the congregation with his improvisations.
“The unaccompanied unaccompanied singing of psalms has really taken a toll here,” says Steenbrink. “It must have been hard to hear: those few thousand people who ‘sang out’ faith at the top of their lungs.”
“I suspect that as soon as the singing started, Sweelinck fled the church so as not to have to hear the screams,” Dirksen grins.
“When foreign musicians walk into a Dutch church on Sundays, they are stunned about the voting, not much has changed there yet,” says Lekkerkerker.
A few rooms further on hangs the portrait of Sweelinck, painted by younger brother Gerrit in 1606, the year of Rembrandt’s birth. “I see a gentle but determined man who has done what he wanted to do, through all the religious violence of his time,” says Van der Kamp.
Lekkerkerker agrees with this suspicion: “I try to form an image on the basis of such a painting. Then I chanced upon the young and brilliant theologian Arminius who argued that free will plays a role in the salvation of human souls. Sweelinck came here every day, he witnessed those debates. Who shows me that painting? Someone who was here every day for forty years.”
“Sweelinck moved with the religious and political tide,” says Steenbrink. “Not much has changed in that regard. We, musicians, do not polarize, but seek connection. That longing is also in that portrait.”
“That painting is very special,” says Dirksen. “So alive. I feel like I can really see him. I see a humane man with a great appearance. The image forms his music, which is human and everything.”
Sweelinck Shut up
Sweelinck’s life’s work was the sounding of all one hundred and fifty psalms from the Genevan psalter. Van der Kamp places them all enormously with his Gesualdo Consort Amsterdam in the Sweelinck Monument. In his view, its achievements trying to reconcile religious edgiers during the twelve-year truce with even disappearing over the horizon, religious strife rose all the higher.
“He wanted to stand the squabbling”, Van der Kamp thinks above. “His psalms should guide everyone, build a bridge between the sworn blows. But music did not possess that much power to his sorrow and stress. His last psalm books and cantions have yet been published, but without the composer’s usual preface. Sweelinck Shut up. Drawing, I think.”
Dirksen: „The Netherlands then boiled over. Sweelinck had that bad luck. The noise turned out to be temporary, but he couldn’t have known it. Only a year after his death did Amsterdam cool down again.”
Sooner or later all four of them had their own Sweelinck moment, the time when his music settled in them for good. It happened to Steenbrink when she was eleven in organ lessons with the variations on Under a lime green. “The music never let go of me.”
Dirksen was also still a young teenager when he heard Sweelinck on one of the first records by harpsichordist Ton Koopman. “Those pieces were overwhelmingly different from anything I knew. The magic of it. I immediately started nagging my parents about those blue Sweelinck tapes with his keyboard works. And then I started studying his keyboard works like crazy.”
Lekkerkerker needed a little longer. „I knew exactly what to do with it, until one day the Sweelinck Cantorij was here in a church service with a trombonist playing the melody. Suddenly the sound came alive, rippling through space like an endless sea of inspiration.”
Sweelinck’s work ‘dribbled in’ at Van der Kamp. He first sang it fifty years ago with church musician conductor Jan Boeke. “We made Psalm 42, the panting deer, escape from the hunt. Magnificent. Boeke was one of the changing ones, who thought that you should sing such a text if your life depended on it.”
In the annual Top400 of Radio4, which can be heard again during the week, Sweelinck – as the largest Dutch composer – was ranked 196 last year with his one hundred and five psalms. The highest ranked compatriot was Simeon ten Holt on ten with his cult hit canto ostinato.
Which individual piece by Sweelinck also possesses that potential?
„Mein junges Leben hat ein End”, says Dirksen immediately. “A world melody, a masterpiece of simplicity. We don’t know where he got it from. Sweelinck usually varied on existing themes. In the Renaissance, an interest was more than invention. Only about two or three centuries later in Romanticism did the meaning come to lie on originality.”
“Funny, my choice too,” nods Lekkerkerker.
“Great piece,” says Steenbrink. “I often play it at weddings, as an ironic nod to marriage.”
Van der Kamp chooses the song Susanne on a trip. “Many composers, but an arrangement of that piece, his is the best. We recently sang it in Vilnius, where they barely know Sweelinck. Many people were crying. And then I think: there’s something about that piece.”
“The same thing strikes me here in the Oude Kerk: musicians and audiences are still enthusiastic about him,” Lekkerkerker agrees. “His music fits effortlessly in the traditional context, but just as well in the experiment. So Sweelinck will outlive us too.”