Joannes Tollius

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Joannes Tollius (* around 1550 in Amersfoort , † probably around 1625 in Copenhagen ) was a Franco-Flemish composer , singer and conductor of the late Renaissance .

Live and act

Joannes Tollius was born Jan van Tol, probably the youngest son of a wealthy family with eight children in Amersfoort. At a very young age he was named as head of music and bandmaster at the Liebfrauenkirche in his hometown. When the city of Amersfoort joined the Calvinist Reformation in 1578 , he lost his position and turned to Italy. Here he got jobs of varying importance; he also had difficulties, partly because of his unbridled nature, partly because of his unconventional religious nature. From 1583 onwards, with the Latinized name Joannes Tollius, he was maestro di cappella at the cathedral of Rieti and in 1584 at the cathedral of Assisi , again only for a short time Time. Before 1585 he joined the order of the Franciscans , was soon dismissed and accepted again a little later. In 1586 he is recorded as a choir singer in Rome and gave testimony there on July 8, 1587 in court about a French coachman. Here he is referred to as the former conductor of Assisi. From May 17, 1588 he was a member of the chapel at the Cathedral of Padua as a tenor singer , where he stayed for over ten years. In 1589 he was charged as a heretic (deviator), but his former employer, the Bishop of Assisi, successfully defended him and brought about a reconciliation. Three books with motets by him with a clear liturgical function were published in Venice in 1590 and 1591 .

Joannes Tollius did not seem to be satisfied with his life in Catholic Italy in the long run. In the 1590s he either revived or re-established contacts with the Protestant north of Europe. He dedicated the Liber primus motectorum to his former musicians in Amersfoort, and his Madrigali , which came out together with another volume of motets in Calvinist Heidelberg , to the Collegium musicum in Amsterdam . In 1601 he left Italy and went to Denmark, where he worked in the court chapel of the Lutheran King Christian IV in Copenhagen from October 10, 1601 and served there until January 18, 1603. From then on his track is lost; There is no information about his further life. It is certain that relatives of him settled his estate in Utrecht in 1629 , for which a nephew from Copenhagen also came. Music historians assume that the composer died there around 1625.

meaning

The compositions by Joannes Tollius, all of which came out in the 1590s, used the contemporary polyphonic notation, but made more frequent use of homophony and stylistic elements of the madrigal for declamatory effects . In addition, his motets contain harmonic and melodic boldness such as unprepared dissonances , excessive sixth chords , jumps in seventh and parallel fifths and octaves for expressive effects; he shows himself to be a progressive composer striving for particular expression on the threshold of a new era. But it would be going too far to describe him as a composer of the early Baroque . Claudio Monteverdi was the set of his sixth book of madrigals Petrarca - sonnet processed without "Zefiro torna" of Tollius.

Works

  • Spiritual works
    • “Motecta de dignitate et moribus sacerdotum, liber primus” with three voices, Venice 1590, missing
    • “Liber primus motectorum” for five votes, Venice 1591
    • “Motectorum […] liber secundus” with five voices, Venice 1591
    • “Moduli […] et sacris bibliis plerique omnes desumpti” with three voices, Heidelberg 1597
  • Secular works
    • “Madrigali” with six voices, Heidelberg 1597
    • “Chi non ha forza o cuore” with five voices in the Laudi amore collection . Madrigali […] di diversi eccellenti musici di Padova , Venice 1598; Edition by A. Bombi, Padua 1995 (= Musica veneta No. 1)
    • “Pargoletta che scherzi” for four voices (incomplete) in the Madrigali de diversi […] raccolti da Gio collection. Maria Radino , Venice 1598

Literature (selection)

  • M. Seiffert: Jan Tollius , in: Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor nederlandse muziekgeschiedenis No. 7, 1901, issue 1, pages 4-19
  • FR Noske: Johannes Tollius, a Dutch master of the early baroque , in: International Musicological Society congress report Cologne 1958, Cologne 1959, page 203-207
  • FR Noske: Een driestemmig Nederlands kerstlied van Joannes Tollius (1597) , in: Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor nederlandse muziekgeschiedenis No. 33, 1983, issue 1/2, pages 101-107
  • R. Rasch: Joannes Tollius (± 1550 - na 1603), componist en musicus , in: Utrechtse biografieën Het Eemland No. 2, 1999, pp. 199–203

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ The Music in Past and Present (MGG), Person Part Volume 16, Bärenreiter and Metzler, Kassel and Basel 2006, ISBN 3-7618-1136-5
  2. ^ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , edited by Stanley Sadie, 2nd Edition, Volume 25, McMillan Publishers, London 2001, ISBN 0-333-60800-3
personal data
SURNAME Tollius, Joannes
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tollius, Johannes; Great, Jan van; Tollio, Giovanni
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Flemish composer and bandmaster of the Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH around 1550
PLACE OF BIRTH Amersfoort
DATE OF DEATH around 1625
Place of death uncertain: Copenhagen