Collegium Musicum (1701)
The Collegium Musicum , founded in Leipzig in 1701, was a student music ensemble that achieved fame in the first half of the 18th century for the high quality of its performances and went down in music history as Telemann's and Bach's Collegium Musicum .
history
prehistory
As early as the middle of the 17th century, there were academic music making communities in the university and trade fair city of Leipzig called Collegium musicum , which were initially organized as ad hoc ensembles. Heads of such collegia were u. a. Johann Rosenmüller , Adam Krieger and Johann Kuhnau . In addition to their own concerts, they took part in the festive church services of the city parish churches and in the opera founded in 1693 . Mostly works were performed that had been newly composed for the respective purpose by the directors of the Collegia or other composers such as Sebastian Knüpfer and Johann Christoph Pezel .
Telemann
In 1701 Georg Philipp Telemann came to Leipzig as a law student and, with the support of Mayor Franz Conrad Romanus, gathered a crowd of music-loving fellow students around him. This ensemble, soon called the Telemannisches Collegium Musicum , developed a fixed organizational structure with regular rehearsals and concerts and played the latest repertoire on a professional level, despite the high fluctuation of its student members.
In 1704 Telemann was given the office of music director of the New Church . This gave his Collegium Musicum a special connection with this church, in which it later made music on the high festivals and during the times of mass, and the leadership of the Collegium remained connected to the leadership of church music at the New Church even after Telemann. At the same time only since 1699 again used as a place of worship New Church in competition with nearby came Thomas Church with its old musical tradition and the Cantor Kuhnau. For this reason Telemann left the city as early as 1705.
Hoffmann, Vogler, Schott
Telemann's successor at the New Church and in the management of the Collegium Musicum was Melchior Hoffmann . In 1708, the court chocolatier Johann Lehmann brought the Collegium to his Markt 16 coffeehouse, where it made music on Wednesday and Friday evenings from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. In the ten years up to his death in 1715, Hoffmann continued to improve the performance of the ensemble and gave it nationwide renown. Later, famous musicians such as Johann Georg Pisendel , Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel and Johann David Heinichen as well as numerous members of Saxon and Thuringian court and church bands emerged from the work of the college. Up to 60 instrumentalists met to make music. The founding of a second academic college by Johann Friedrich Fasch in 1708, which was later headed by Johann Gottlieb Görner , did nothing to change this. Rather, this led to a regular, alternating event rhythm.
Johann Gottfried Vogler was appointed Hoffmann's successor . However, his term of office remained an episode as he fled Leipzig in 1719 due to indebtedness and misappropriation of instruments.
In 1720 Georg Balthasar Schott became music director of the New Church and head of Telemann's Collegium Musicum. In 1723 the cooperation with Gottfried Zimmermann , the owner of the Zimmermann coffee house on Katharinenstrasse, began. He made the hall of his café available to the Collegium in winter and his coffee garden on Grimmaischer Steinweg in summer , both with space for the musicians and around 150 listeners. Two-hour concerts were held there once a week, twice a week during the trade fair. Zimmermann also increased the range of instruments at his own expense; its economic advantage was evidently not neglected.
Brook
In 1723 Johann Sebastian Bach came to Leipzig as Thomaskantor. Unlike his predecessor Kuhnau, as part of his official duties, he was also given the supervision of church music at the New Church and tried to end the old rivalry. He worked constructively with Schott.
In 1729 Georg Balthasar Schott went to Gotha as city cantor . Carl Gotthelf Gerlach received his office at the New Church . The necessary approval of the Thomaskantor Bach was apparently linked to the condition that the church music office was separated from the management of the Collegium Musicum. He now took over this himself - he had already worked as a guest conductor and probably also as a soloist with the Collegium - and thus considerably expanded his scope of influence in Leipzig's musical life.
For now Bachisches Collegium Musicum were active-called ensemble in which his sons and pupils, Bach wrote many of his secular cantatas, the first well BWV 201 , later to match the Zimmermann's coffee house as a venue, the Coffee Cantata . The Collegium Concerts gave him the opportunity to re-perform orchestral works from the Weimar and Köthen periods, such as the Brandenburg Concerts and the orchestra suites. The violin concertos may have been written especially for the college. He turned several of his instrumental works into harpsichord concerts for the Collegium , a new genre that paved the way for the piano concerto . The Collegium Musicum also participated in the frequent music of congratulations and homage to the ruling house, and many of its members took part in Bach's church music in the Thomas and Nikolaikirche .
When Johann Heinrich Zedler was editing his Universal Lexicon in the 1730s , he concluded the short article on the subject of Collegium musicum with the sentence: "In Leipzig, the Bach Collegium musicum is famous above all others".
The End
On March 4, 1737, Bach handed over the management of the college to Carl Gotthelf Gerlach, presumably because of overload, but continued to work with him, for example on April 28, 1738 when the (lost) cantata BWV Anh. 13 was performed and took over Management again on October 2, 1739. It is not known when he finally gave it up, certainly not before the death of the café animal Zimmermann in 1741, but probably not until a few years later. Johann Trier directed the ensemble from May 1, 1746 until probably 1747 . Gerlach is attested again as director of the "Bachischen" Collegium Musicum in 1751, after which there is no further mention of the ensemble.
The Collegium Musicum, founded by Telemann and run at the highest level by Bach, played a decisive role in the development of a bourgeois - neither court nor church - musical life in Germany. In Leipzig it was eclipsed from 1743 by the newly established Das Große Concert , from which the Gewandhausorchester later emerged.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j The "Bach" Collegium musicum , website of the New Bach Collegium Musicum
- ↑ Ernst Müller: The house names of old Leipzig . (Writings of the Association for the History of Leipzig, Volume 15). Leipzig 1931, reprint Ferdinand Hirt 1990, ISBN 3-7470-0001-0 , p. 42
- ↑ a b Christoph Wolff : Johann Sebastian Bach , Frankfurt / Main 2000, p. 381
- ↑ Biography (bach-cantatas.com, English)
- ↑ Wolff, p. 379f.
- ↑ Wolff, p. 274
- ↑ Wolff, p. 380
- ↑ Wolff, p. 382
- ↑ Johann Trier (bach-cantatas.com, English)