Like her second step-mother in many ways, Sophie Elisabeth would also become the third wife to a widower when she married Duke August of Brunswick and Lüneburg (1579-1666) at the age of 20; her musico-literary pursuits were already well established at the time of the marriage. August’s scholarly interests made him one of the most learned nobles of his day; his library formed the basis for today’s magnificent Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. The couple lived in Brunswick, where Sophie Elisabeth cared for her four stepchildren and bore three children of her own, several of whom took instruction from the poet Justus Georg Schottelius. The ducal pair hired an orchestra and a Kapellmeister for their court and soon the young duchess was setting to music plays and ballets written by Schottelius, herself, and others. Sophie Elisabeth composed a number of dialogues for Friedens Sieg (ed. Geck, 1996) in 1642, around the time of the Goslar Preliminary Peace Agreement, a play that was repeated at the conclusion of the war in association with the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Here we find music for four treble voices, each portraying one of the “War Horrors” (Hunger, Poverty, Injustice, and Death) who sing three verses in alternation with two homophonic quartet numbers. In the first dialogue, verse 1, Death sings in major triadic phrases, Hunger cannot get more than one syllable out at a time; Poverty’s lines are conjunct and slow in minor mode, while Injustice concludes the dialogue in the style of Death’s persona.

Close to the end of the Thirty Years’ War the ducal pair moved to Wolfenbüttel, where Sophie Elisabeth consulted with Heinrich Schütz on at least two occasions regarding improvements for the court orchestra. His musical style left a deep impression on the duchess’s own compositions; her devotional songs for solo voice recall his Kleine geistliche Konzerte in their attention to clear and effective Germanic text setting with metric shifts and varied note lengths, as well as their careful and pleasing continuo writing. Solo settings of sacred songs form the bulk of Sophie Elisabeth’s compositional output. Indeed, her attentiveness to detail on a purely literary level is apparent from a translation into German that she made of parts of a novel by Honoré d’Urfé, presumably in connection with her activity in the aforementioned academy.