Aegidius Bassengius

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Aegidius Bassengius (* mid-16th century in Liège ; † April 1595 in Wiener Neustadt ) was a Franco-Flemish composer and conductor of the late Renaissance .

Live and act

No information has come down to us about the youth and training of Aegidius Bassengius, including his early work. That he comes from Liège is evident from the dedication text of his motet collection from 1591, which is signed Aegidius Bassengius Leodiensis . The first direct surviving document about him is a payment document from the cathedral chapter protocols of the Archdiocese of Salzburg from 1588 about the payment of two guilders to him for the dedication of a choral composition ; Music historians conclude from this that the composer applied for a job in Salzburg. Nothing is known about the success of the application, but a year later Bassengius applied for a position at the imperial court. In the invoices of the court pay office for April and December 1589 payments of 25 and 40 guilders respectively to Bassengius are listed. Here he is referred to as Musico and Capelnsinger ; so he probably worked for some time in the chapel. However, this did not result in permanent employment.

A short time later, Bassengius is in the service of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian III. kicked. Maximilian was Grand Master of the Teutonic Order at that time and took his residence in the castle of Wiener Neustadt in 1590; here Bassengius got the position of conductor of court music. As can be seen from the marriage register of the cathedral parish there, the composer married here in the same year. At the beginning of 1595, Aegidius Bassengius was also given the position of city ​​organist , but died in April of the same year. According to the Cathedral Parish's Book of the Dead, he was buried on May 1, 1595 in a cemetery in Wiener Neustadt.

meaning

His collective print Motectorum Liber primus contains 15 motets, four of which are two-part works and one work each in three or four parts . Most of the texts go back to psalms and show an affect -oriented text interpretation through musical rhetoric . In the five- and six-part motets, Bassengius developed a flowing contrapuntal notation; on the other hand, elements of the Venetian polyphony can be found in the eight-part works.

Works

  • Collective print Motectorum Quinque, Sex, Octo vocum Liber primus. Leonhard Formica, Vienna 1591
  • Motet Anima mea liquefacta est , five voices, only Discantus preserved

Literature (selection)

  • Robert Eitner : Biographical-Bibliographical Sources-Lexicon of Musicians and Music Scholars of the Christian Era up to the Middle of the 19th Century , Volume 1, Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1900, Page 386 online
  • Karl Christ : The old French manuscripts of the Palatina , Leipzig 1916, page 20 digitized
  • A. Smijers: The imperial court music band from 1543–1619 , in: Studies on Musicology (Supplements to the Monuments of Music in Austria) No. 7, 1920, pages 102–142
  • J. Mayer: History of Wiener Neustadt , Wiener Neustadt 1927
  • W. Senn: Music and Theater at the Court of Innsbruck , Innsbruck 1954
  • Rudolf Hopfner: Egide Bassenge. A style-critical analysis of his collection of motets from 1591 , dissertation at the University of Vienna in 1988

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Music in Past and Present (MGG), Person Part Volume 2, Bärenreiter and Metzler, Kassel and Basel 1999, ISBN 3-7618-1112-8 .
  2. ^ Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , 2nd Edition, Volume 2. McMillan Publishers, London 2001, ISBN 0-333-60800-3 . Preview online

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bassengius, Aegidius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bassange, Aegidius; Passenger, Aegidius; Baßengl, Aegidius; Bassenges, Gilles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Flemish composer and bandmaster of the Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH 16th Century
PLACE OF BIRTH Liege
DATE OF DEATH April 1595
Place of death Wiener Neustadt