The Wartburg Choir will perform at the legendary Basilica de San Marco in Venice, Italy, during its eight-country international tour April 26-May 21.

Besides singing at the landmark cathedral in St. Mark’s Piazza and Milan and Florence, Italy, the choir also will travel to Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, France and Turkey, as well as spending a week in Germany with stops connecting it to the college’s roots. The choir will have 18 concerts.

The choir applied and was selected to sing high Mass at San Marco, according to Dr. Lee Nelson, director of Wartburg choral activities. It will honor the legacy of the cathedral’s foremost Renaissance composers, Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi, and their German pupil Heinrich Schütz, whose compositions, in turn, influenced Johann Sebastian Bach.

Gabrieli took full advantage of San Marco’s architecture, which presents “a pretty unique opportunity” for the Wartburg Choir, Nelson said. “His compositions are known for using multiple choirs put into different lofts in the basilica. As they would sing, the acoustics would meld the multiple choirs together in the center of the sanctuary.”

“The church is steeped in history and maintains a rich musical tradition upheld by some of history’s great composers, which impacted our repertoire,” he added. “The entire first set of our program will be either music based out of San Marco or influenced by its late Renaissance composers, which then connects us to Germany and the Lutheran tradition.”

Wartburg, which was founded by missionaries from Germany, is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

During the choir's last European tour in 2011, Nelson said, “audiences enjoyed our performances of the great European composers such as J.S. Bach, but what they really liked were our American folk songs, spirituals and hymn settings.

“So during the second half of the program, the repertoire is dedicated to America, tracing the roots of American music, starting with Shaker songs and ending with modern pieces by Morten Lauridsen and Moses Hogan.”

The Eastern European portion of the tour will include Lutheran churches in Sibiu and Medias, Romania, and Budapest, Hungary. Church officials from both countries have visited the Wartburg campus in recent years.

The choir also will sing in Modra, Slovakia, then spend time in Vienna and Salzburg, Austria, studying the musical history of the cities as part of its May Term course, Tour with the Arts, taught by Dr. Brian Pfaltzgraff, associate professor of music.

From there the choir heads to Colmar, France, and Germany, where it will sing in Stuttgart, Ohringen and Leipheim as well as Neuendettelsau, home of the missionaries sent to found Wartburg as a teachers’ college for German immigrants in the United States, and in Eisenach, site of the Wartburg Castle.

The choir will perform for the visiting Wartburg College Board of Regents and Cabinet while in Neuendettelsau, for German dignitaries in the Wartburg Castle, and for the public at Eisenach’s Nickolaikirche (Nickolai Church), which was built in 1180.

The final stop is Istanbul, Turkey, where it will perform in an Armenian church.