Music in Counter -Reformation Augsburg: Musicians, rituals, and repertories in a religiously divided city

By the late sixteenth century the southern German city of Augsburg was one of the largest cities of the Empire, boasting a rich cultural life enhanced by the patronage of local patricians and close mercantile ties to Italy. The city enjoyed an active musical culture nearly unparalleled in Germany, involving the contributions of musicians like Jacobus de Kerle, Hans Leo Hassler, and Gregor Aichinger, who were among the first composers in Germany to be inspired by the fashionable Italian idioms of the late Renaissance and early Baroque. This cultural activity, however, unfolded against a backdrop of looming religious schism. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, Augsburg was the largest "biconfessional" city in the Empire, housing a Protestant majority and Catholic minority, ruled by a city government divided between the two faiths. Except for a brief outbreak of confessional violence in 1584, the authorities succeeded in keeping the religious peace until the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. However, the period saw a widening of the cultural divide between the two faiths. The arrival of the Jesuits in the 1580s polarized the religious atmosphere, and the adoption of Counter-Reformation ideology among the city's clergy and Catholic patricians fueled the assertion of Catholic identity, expressed in public devotional services, processions through Protestant neighborhoods, and pilgrimages to local shrines. The Catholic music produced for these contexts (monophonic and polyphonic, Latin and vernacular) both reflected and contributed to the religious divide, embracing the imagery of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, the Passion of Christ, and the saints. Although sacred polyphony in Protestant institutions maintained an ecumenical profile, the simple German songs, psalms, and chorales performed by common Protestants expressed increasing resistance against Catholicism. This study, covering the decades immediately preceding the Thirty Years War (1580--1630), shows the vital role of music in reflecting and shaping the diverging confessional identities of Augsburg's Catholic and Protestant citizens. Although the study investigates the musical life of a single city in depth, it carries numerous implications for the study of musical culture in the early modern era, and offers a new perspective on the relationship of music and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.