Rhetorical Personification of the Dead in 17th-Century German Funeral Music: Heinrich Schutz's Musikalische Exequien (1636) and Three Works by Michael Wiedemann (1693)

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-213
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 616-640
Author(s):  
Robin A. Leaver

Brahms's German Requiem stands at the end of a long line of Lutheran funerary music. Luther reworked funeral responsories into a new, totally Biblical form, and later Lutherans collected anthologies of Biblical texts on death and dying. Such sources were used by later composers, including Schüütz and Bach, to compose funeral pieces on Biblical texts together with appropriate chorales. Brahms's opus 45 is similar in that its text is made up of Biblical verses assembled by the composer, and connections may be drawn between chorale usage in this work and the composer's Protestant upbringing in Hamburg on one hand, and in his knowledge of two cantatas by Bach (BWV 21 and 27), on the other. The text and structure of the work accord with general, north German Protestantism, and the famous letter to Reinthaler, which many have taken as a demonstration of Brahms's general humanistic tendencies, shows Brahms to be standing aloof from the theological controversies of his day in favor of a basic understanding of Biblical authors. Part of the problem was that the first performance was scheduled for Good Friday in Bremen cathedral; Reinthaler, the organist, and the cathedral clergy would have preferred passion music of some kind and what Brahms gave them was something different. Brahms surely knew of the distinctive Lutheran observance of "Totensonntag," the commemoration of the dead on the last Sunday in the church year (the Sunday before Advent). There are many similarities between Brahms's Requiem and Friedrich Wilhelm Markull's Das Gedäächtnis der Entschlafen (The Remembrance of those Who Sleep) of ca. 1847. Since Markull's work is subtitled Oratorium füür die Todtenfeier am letzten Sonntage des Kirchenjahres (Oratorio for the Celebration of the Dead on the Last Sunday of the Church Year), it is possible that Brahms had the same occasion in mind when composing his German Requiem.


Neophilology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 134-140
Author(s):  
Margarita S. Sosnizkaja

First in Russian the collection “Tale of Tales” by the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile (1566–72?–1632) was published in 2016. Most people know plots fragments of the collection from the tales of Brothers Grimm, Carlo Gozzi, Charles Pierrot and A.S. Pushkin. Inspired by the book the movie “Tale of Tales” was shot in 2015, it was directed by Matteo Garrone and got the Italian national film award “Davide di Donatello”. There are some selected plots of these tales; we indicate who actually is “the little animal” (and the Puss in Boots), what mythological background the figures of the Swan Princess, the Dead Princess have. We also consider the Dead Princess’s relation to different world roving plots, including “The Sleeping Beauty” by P.I. Tchaikovsky. We present analogies in rites and customs of the Russian (as well as Ukrainian) folk tales, a pantheon of gods from different peoples, Old Testament. The meaning of the names we establish along with the alchemical formula of A.S. Pushkin, of N.V. Gogol’s Viy and Basile’s Mother of Time; there is also the characterization of N.V. Gogol by P.V. Annenkov (1813–1887). We show the trans-alphabetic coincidence of the meaning of multilingual words, of the calendar names with the mythologic gods’ names related to the different planets. We also present the A.N. Afanasyev’s analysis of one Basile’s fairy tales from in the “Poetic views on nature of the Slavs”, and there are given some thoughts of V.Y. Propp (1895–1970) on the identified topics along with a brief assessment on the oeuvres of A.S. Pushkin given by the renowned specialist in literature P.V. Palievsky (1932–2019).


2017 ◽  
Vol 163 ◽  
pp. 337-348
Author(s):  
Alicja Z. Nowak

Senescence counted not only in yearsin Ruthenian mourning literature 17th centuryIn Ukrainian and Belarusian 17th century literature of mourning there is no one common to all the authors vision of old age. It was presented as adifficult state, filled with suffering and even dangerous for those whom mental and bodily weakness prevented the holding of penance-delayed too long. At the same time, this grim vision coexisted with the optimistic picture of the autumn of life active and fruitful in creative activities. Old age was the penalty for sin, but also one way of moving away from him and sourcing selection everlasting. Old age was sometimes synonymous with maturity, wisdom, young people, could be asymbol of duration in sin.Despite that dra ws certain tendency to recognition of the topic related to the fact that these considerations were partly subordinated to panegyric, and above all pastoral goal. Traditional mourning for the composition elements: to show the size of the loss, mourning the dead or solace grief of the living, most often occur as acomponent of moral exhortations and instructions. The explanation of this trend must be sought in an environment of contemporary authors’ funeral compositions. They were mainly representatives of the intellectual elite of clerical: priests, bishops and archimandrites; church reformers at the same time, cultural activists, workers and publisher. So those who took on their shoulders the renewal of religious life and spiritual and cultural life in The Metropolitanate of Kiev, realizing it and by disseminated in mourning texts role models and moral attitude.Старість не тільки роками вилічуванав руській траурній літературі 17 століттяВ українській та білоруській жалобній літературі 17-го століття відсутнє спільне для всіх авторів бачення старості. Вона зображена передусім як складний стан, наповнений стражданням, особливо небезпечний для тих, кому психічна та тілесна слабість не дозволила здійснити надто довго відкладуваного покаяння. Водночас цей похмурий образ співіснував з оптимістичною картиною осени життя — активної і плідної творчою діяльністю. Старість була водночас покаранням за гріх, засобом відходу від нього і здобування доброї вічності. Іноді — синонімом зрілості, мудрості молодих, або символом гріховного існування.Попри ці суперечності у підході до проблеми старості можна простежити певну тенденцію використання теми. Вона пов’язана з фактом часткового її підпорядкування панегіричній та, перш за все, пастирській меті. Традиційні елементи траурних композицій: зазначення розміру втрати, оплакування померлого, заспокоєння душевного болю живих — найчастіше виступають як компоненти моральних настанов та інструкцій.Пояснення цієї тенденції слід шукати в середовищі авторів — в основному представників інтелектуальної еліти, насамперед духовної єпископи, ігумени та архімандрити, в той же час церковних реформаторів, культурних діячів, видавців. Отже, це були подвижники оновлення релігійного та духовно-культурного життя в Київській Митрополії, які реалізували його, між іншим, шляхом поширення в траурних текстах життєвих взірців та зразків моральної поведінки.


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