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Ach mein herzliebes Jesulein by Michael Altenburg
I hope you are doing well. I'm writing to share a cool motet by a composer of whom you may or may not have heard.
He's called Michael Altenburg (1584-1640) and he was a theologian and musician who spent most of his life in Erfurt,
a place many of us visited in 2005. It's right in the heart of Bach Country, not far from the Bach towns of Eisenach, Arnstadt, Mühlhausen and Weimar. Here's a little connect-the-dots map which demonstrates
​the propinquity of these five cool towns.

These days Altenburg is known (to the extent that he is known at all) for some wonderful 'Intradas', many of which combine a five-part instrumental ensemble with a single voice singing a chorale melody. Here's a pretty good pandemic recording of 'Ein feste Burg', which will give you the lay of the Altenburgian land (so to speak). There are several other recordings on YouTube, many with the vocal part played instrumentally. (I don't think this works as well because the chorale line doesn't stand forward as it should. On the other hand, it means not having to deal with singers, who [as you know] can be subject to divers complaints, ailments and peculiarities.)

In doing repertoire planning for our 2021 Early Music Christmas (!), I came across a series of different Altenburg pieces, more like motets; some of them are chorale-based, others not. They seem to mostly come from a 1621 publication called 'Musikalische Weihnachts-Zierde' ('Musical Christmas Ornament). If interested, you can find a number of them here.

The one that really caught my eye and ear as I prowled around the usual hangouts for people like me was 'Ach mein herzliebes Jesulein'. I found it in a truly wonderful performance by Ensemble Polyharmonique from the halcyon period Before Covid. (We may not have known at the time that it was halcyon, but in retrospect it sure was.) That led me to the CPDL link above, and now it's in the hopper for some future performance, along with, no doubt, more Altenburg as well.

In the meantime, I think you'll enjoy listening to and looking at this music. It's so honest and transparent and poetic!--a great example of the 17th-century aesthetic, designed to move the mind as well as the spirit, with each composer finding his/her own way of going about the task.

Attached is a score, a text-translation sheet, and the audio from the YouTube link above. Ensemble Polyharmonique was already on my radar, by the way. They have done extraordinary recordings of music by Tobias Michael, 
​
Andreas Hammerschmidt, and now Heinrich Schütz, among others.
Click here to download learning materials
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