Mendelssohn’s Deutsche Liturgie in the Context of the Prussian Agende of 1829

2020 ◽  
pp. 346-375
Author(s):  
Laura K. T. Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music

Felix Mendelssohn’s 1846 setting of the Deutsche Liturgie is among the least understood of his sacred compositions. Far from being an isolated instance of music intended for the liturgy of the Prussian Union Church, Mendelssohn’s work participates in and responds to a tradition of such settings that can be traced back to the 1829 Prussian Agende, whose Musik-Anhang was compiled by Mendelssohn’s teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter. A comparison of Mendelssohn’s setting with those composed by Eduard Grell and Wilhelm Taubert offers a context for reappraising Mendelssohn’s sacred music in light of the historicist values of mid-nineteenth-century Berlin and for nuancing our understanding of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics, creative choices, and intellectual approach to sacred music.

Music and ceremonial in the Low Countries: Philip the Fair and the Order of the Golden Fleece

1985 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 113-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Prizer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Polyphonic Music

The Order of the Golden Fleece, a chivalric order that flourished in Burgundy and the Low Countries from 1431 to 1559, has attracted the attention of historians of politics, culture and art since the nineteenth century, but it has been little explored by music historians, who have contented themselves with a mention of the order's existence and with descriptions of one of its more famous, but less characteristic, events: the Feast of the Oath of the Pheasant. Nevertheless, the order had a strong influence on sacred music during the period of its greatest activity, requiring polyphonic music for many of its functions and perhaps commissioning works by such composers as Josquin Desprez and Alexander Agricola. This influence is intimately tied to the structure of the Order of the Golden Fleece and to the desire of the successive sovereigns for ostentatious display when the group met.

Bridging Divides: Verdi's Requiem in Post-Unification Italy

2015 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-342
Author(s):  
Francesca Vella
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Previous Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alessandro Manzoni ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Late Nineteenth

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the early Italian reception of Verdi's Messa da Requiem (1874), premièred in Milan on the first anniversary of the death of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Previous literature has focused on issues of musical genre and the work's political implications (particularly its connections with Manzoni and with late nineteenth-century Italian revivals of ‘old’ sacred music). The article examines, instead, the curiously pluralistic concerns of contemporary critics, as well as certain aspects of Verdi's vocal writing, with the aim of destabilizing traditional dichotomies such as old/new, sacred/operatic, vocal/instrumental and progress/crisis. It argues for more broad-ranging political resonances of Verdi's work, suggesting that the negotiation of a variety of boundaries both in Verdi's music and in its contemporary discussion made the Requiem dovetail with wider cultural attempts to define Italian identity.

scholarly journals “Nearer to the Exercises of Heaven”: Nineteenth-Century Maritime Presbyterians and The Choir (pp 49-87)

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Creighton Barrett ◽  
Bertrum MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
British North America ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Singing Style ◽  
History Of ◽  
Printed Music

Singing, particularly psalm singing, has enjoyed a lengthy tradition among Christian churches. “Singing God’s praises brings us nearer to the exercises of Heaven than any other service we can engage on earth” proclaimed one nineteenth-century advertisement. Churches as well as singing schools frequently relied on tunes that circulated across countries and oceans through oral transmission and increasingly through printed tune books, as the capacity of printing technologies expanded in the nineteenth century and pricing of books became affordable to larger numbers of citizens. Singing instructions, tunes, and hymns were printed, reprinted, and modified to meet local demand. Music styles that lost favour in some countries continued to flourish in other settings. The first printed music in Nova Scotia, The Harmonicon, was produced in a Presbyterian context in 1838. Three decades later, demand for a new tune book prompted the Synod of the Presbyterian Church of the Lower Provinces of British North America to publish The Choir, a compilation designed to satisfy “a healthy taste for sacred music.” First published in Halifax in 1871, this volume was the mainstay of Maritime Presbyterian congregations for the remainder of the century. This paper traces the history of the production of The Choir, compiled by the church’s Committee on Psalmody. Details about the editions and reprinting of the tune book are provided. The paper concludes with an examination of the contents of the volume, where particular attention is given to elements of the book that illustrate the compilers’ attention to the local audience for which it was intended, including the use of local place names for tune titles, and the inclusion of locally composed tunes and fuging tunes, which were written for an antiquated singing style that persisted in the Maritimes long after it faded from church music in other parts of North America and the United Kingdom.

scholarly journals Topos of Vienna as a place of deployment of meanings in the musical culture of the Habsburg Galicia

2018 ◽  
pp. 100-112
Author(s):  
Myroslava Novakovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Orchestral Works ◽  
Musical Rhetoric ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Main City

The article deals with separate geographically defined places connected with the spaces of national cultural memory. It is alleged that these are "places of memories" that became centers of cultural and spiritual life of Ukrainians outside Ukraine. It is stated that for the Ukrainians of Galicia, Vienna remained a "memorable place" during the nineteenth century. As the main city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was a model for imitation and contributed to the expansion of social structures in Galicia, which became the means of organizing here artistic life. The concept of the "topos of Vienna" is considered through the prism of the categories of sacred / profane, as a sacred music city, associated primarily with the name of VA Mozart. The author analyzes the cantata "The Testament" of Verbytsky, written on the text of the eponymous verse by T. Shevchenko. The composer sought appropriate musical expressions outside the national sphere, so the orchestral introduction to the "Testament" reminds the beginning of the overture to Mozart's "Don Juan", with a particularly sharp dynamic contrast, which symbolizes two worlds - the dead and the living. The influence of Mozart on the creativity of the composers of the Przemysl School is due to their particular attitude to the tradition. After all, Mozart was for them the embodiment of the high classical canon, and not just classicism as a style. It is noted that the Austrian military coloured entertaining music was directly related to the work of M. Verbytsky. The composer used elements of military musical rhetoric in his orchestral works. It is alleged that for the Galician musicians of the last quarter of the nineteenth century exemplary was the work of F. Schubert. An example of such influence is the song by O. Nyzhankivsky "The Past of the Year of Youth" by the words of T. Shevchenko. A model for the composer could be the song of Schubert "Premonition of a Warrior" from his last cycle "Swan Singing". The basis of the work is the contrasting comparison of two figurative spheres: gloomy foreboding and light memories. The article also examines the period of Viennese fin-de-siecle and its influence on the work of S. Lyudkevych. It is noted that the characteristic signs of fin-de-siecle are present in the Caucasus symphony cantata. After all, it combines the spirit of Wagner's greatness with the indisputable optimism of Bethoven's "Ode to Joy".

Amzi Chapin: Frontier Singing Master and Folk Hymn Composer

1975 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-119
Author(s):  
James W. Scholten
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Pennsylvania ◽  
Singing Schools

Amzi Chapin was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in March 1768. From 1791 to 1795 he taught in Virginia and North Carolina. In 1795 Amzi moved to Kentucky where he resided and taught singing schools. The available evidence indicates that he and an older brother, Lucius, were among the first singing masters to teach sacred music west of the Alleghenies. In 1800 Amzi moved to western Pennsylvania where he farmed and taught singing schools periodically until 1831, when he and his family moved to Northfield, Ohio. Amzi resided there until his death on February 19, 1835. From the time of his death until 1969, Amzi Chapin remained a shadowy figure in the history of American music, although both his and his brother' s tunes were included in well-known collections of American sacred music during the nineteenth century. Although Mary O. Eddy did some research on Amzi Chapin in the 1940' s, her research has been relatively unknown to scholars in American music during the past twenty years.

From the Church to the Concert Hall

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
R. Larry Todd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
The Church

‘Every room in which Bach is performed is transformed into a church.’ We do not know the context for this remark attributed to Mendelssohn (sometime before March 1835), but it reflects one significant thread in the nineteenth-century ‘emancipation of music’, namely the revival of the music of J.S. Bach, and his transformation from a largely forgotten Leipzig church musician into a dominant, canonic figure in European concert music. This chapter revisits some familiar aspects of Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s music, for example the seminal revival of the St. Matthew Passion in 1829, and Mendelssohn’s spiritual trajectory from Judaism to Christianity, and then explores ways in which his own music tested boundaries between sacred music for performance in church versus the concert hall. One way in which Mendelssohn allied his music with the spiritual was through the use of imaginary, ‘free’ chorales—that is, newly composed, textless chorale melodies that he inserted into a number of his purely instrumental compositions as a means of underscoring his newly acquired Protestant faith. The chapter concludes by exploring the significance of this device for several other nineteenth-century composers who similarly invoked the divine and sacred in their concert music

scholarly journals Tommaso Giordani, Gregorio Ballabene’s Messa a dodici cori con organo and Sacred Music in Late-Eighteenth-Century Dublin

2016 ◽  
pp. 25-35
Author(s):  
Richard Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The Dublin career of Tommaso Giordani as a theatre musician and composer is well known, but almost nothing has been known of his role in directing music at the Roman-Catholic chapel in Francis Street, Dublin, in the time of Archbishop John Thomas Troy. This article brings to light the fact that, when his musical library was auctioned at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it included a manuscript of the Messa per dodici cori con organo composed in 1774 by Gregorio Ballabene. The performance of such a work would be remarkable in Ireland at this date, and the existence of a copy is remarkable enough. In 1827 it was auctioned among the possessions of the parish priest of Francis Street Chapel, but where it went is not known.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document