Gregory Johnston

Gregory Johnston, Strategic Debt and the Retention of Court Musicians in Seventeenth-Century Germany

During the Thirty Years’ War, Protestant Hofkapellen were depleted and even disbanded in order to fuel the military conflicts. Much has been made in the scholarly literature about court-appointed musicians not being paid during the war, sometimes for years at a time, though scholars to date have not looked deeper into these circumstances or the implications.

The present study investigates the extent to which these conditions can be attributed to the war, and the degree to which courts habitually created a climate of debt between themselves and their employees. Unpaid musicians, including Heinrich Schütz, were initially forced to exhaust their own resources and then compelled to obtain bridging loans from elsewhere in order to survive. They were not just dependent upon the court for their livelihood, they became in effect economic hostages to their employers. Should they quit their position at court, they would forfeit all money owed and then have to face their creditors alone and without court protection. If they left illegally (insalutato hospite), they were unlikely to hold a court appointment ever again. This project is an examination of these practices that existed long before the war began and long after hostilities had ended, practices that were systemic, strategic, and, most important, culturally formative in shaping and maintaining the composition of the Hofkapellen.