He wrote what is traditionally considered the first German opera, Dafne, performed at Torgau in 1627, the music of which has since been lost, along with nearly all of his ceremonial and theatrical scores.

He is commemorated as a musician in the Calendar of Saints of some North American Lutheran churches on 28 July with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel.

Schütz's Dresden compositions during the Thirty Years' War were, by necessity of the times, smaller-scale than the often massive earlier works; this period produced much of his most charming music.

Schütz's music, while in the most progressive styles early in his career, eventually grew simple and almost austere, culminating in his late Passion settings.

[7] His funeral music "Musikalische Exequien" (1636) for his noble friend Heinrich Posthumus of Reuss is considered a masterpiece, and is known today as the first German Requiem.

His harmonies often result from the contrapuntal alignment of voices rather than from any sense of "harmonic motion"; contrastingly, much of his music shows a strong tonal pull when approaching cadences.

His music includes a great deal of imitation, but structured in such a way that the successive voices do not necessarily enter after the same number of beats or at predictable intervallic distances.

This contrasts sharply with the manner of his contemporary Johann Hermann Schein and Samuel Scheidt, whose counterpoint usually flows in regularly spaced entries.

As noted above, Schütz's style became simpler in his later works, which make less frequent use of the kind of distantly related chords and licences found in such pieces as "Was hast du verwirket" (SWV 307) from Kleine geistliche Konzerte II.

Beyond the early book of madrigals, almost no secular music by Schütz has survived, save for a few domestic songs (arien) and occasional commemorative items (such as Wie wenn der Adler sich aus seiner Klippe schwingt (SWV 434), and no purely instrumental music at all (unless one counts the short instrumental movement, "sinfonia", that encloses the dialogue of Die sieben Worte), even though he had a reputation as one of Germany's finest organists.

The style of the North German organ school derives largely from Schütz (as well as from the Dutchman Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck); a century later this music culminated in the work of J.S.