Johannes Nucius

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memorial plaque for Abbot Johannes Nucius

Johannes Nucius SOCist , actually Johannes Nüßler , (* 1556 in Görlitz ; † March 25, 1620 in Himmelwitz ) was a German Cistercian and abbot of the Himmelwitz monastery , as well as a composer and music theorist .

Live and act

The year of birth of Johannes Nucius in 1556 is not considered to be absolutely certain. All important data about himself come from the respective prefaces to his printed works, whereby his place of birth Görlitz was given by himself in the edition of his motets (1591). The preface to his work Musices poeticae from December 1612 contains the statement that he has been concerned with music for 42 years, but this does not result in a certain year of birth. Strictly speaking, the year 1556, which is often mentioned in general literature, is an assumption. According to his own statement, he was a student of Johann Winckler from Mittweida at the Görlitz grammar school Augustum , who worked in Görlitz from 1573 to 1582. Forty years later, the composer still praised Winckler's lessons, which, as he explained in the preface, gave him the basis for his Musices poeticae . The composer's good knowledge of Latin also results in a sound humanistic education. Around 1586, Nucius entered the Cistercian Abbey of Rauden in Upper Silesia, which points to a later year of birth, because it was rather unusual for a novice to only enter a monastery at the age of 30. A little later he was ordained a deacon .

In 1591 he was elected Abbot of Himmelwitz, a smaller subsidiary of the Rauden Monastery. In 1598 he delegated many of his administrative duties to one of his priors in order to gain more time for composing and writing. During this time he wrote his second book of motets, dedicated to the Leubuss abbot Matthäus Rudolph, which appeared together with the second edition of his first book of motets in 1609 by Nicolaus Sartorius (1605-1670) in Liegnitz . The masses that were also created during this period have not been preserved since they were not printed. The treatise Musices poeticae , which was important for the theory of composition in the 17th century , was published in 1613. In a fire in the monastery on June 22, 1617, the church and more than half of the buildings as well as the entire collection of notes were destroyed, including part of Nucius' works, including the second part of the manuscript of the above-mentioned treatise. One consequence of the fire was that Nucius was very busy in the last two years of his life directing the reconstruction of the church and monastery.

Johannes Nucius died seriously ill and went blind on March 25, 1620 in Himmelwitz and was buried in the abbey church he had built. A plaque commemorates him in the place where he died.

meaning

The main part of the surviving compositions by Johannes Nucius can be found in the two printed editions of 1591 and 1609 with a total of 102 motets, 97 of them with Latin text and five with German. The motet and parody fair Cara Theodorum and the motet Altera dos Thalami are directly related to the Neisser school Georg Wolff (died 1609). The style of the motets still corresponds exactly to the style that was widespread in the second half of the 16th century. Despite the gap of 18 years, there are hardly any differences in style between the first and second book of motets. The second book contains a dedicatory poem in which Nucius is distinguished in an honorable way with Jacobus Clemens non Papa , Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso . Most motets are not based on a cantus firmus , only in the first book this occurs occasionally. The motets are mainly based on liturgical texts. The composer used the musical figures dealt with in his theoretical work in all variants and in abundance. Nucius lived in a transition period between Renaissance and Baroque , with the dramatic and expressive potential of music taking precedence in relation to the texts in the 17th century, a development that the composer took into account in both his music and his treatise.

Nucius' Musices poeticae is of outstanding importance for the reference to rhetoric in musical figure theory . He was the first to divide the figures into figurae principales and figures minus principales . This classification was later adopted by Joachim Thuringus (17th century), Athanasius Kircher and Thomas Balthasar Janowka (1669–1741) and was thus decisive for the further development of figure theory. Similar to Joachim Burmeister , Nucius regards the figures as the ornament of a composition. Following the above-mentioned main classification of the figures, Nucius describes examples of “stimulus words”, which he divides into three categories, and which are to be “expressed” and “imitated” musically ( sunt experimenda & pingenda ). Along with Burmeister, Nucius is one of the creators of the parallelization of rhetorical figures and typesetting issues, which became effective under the concept of musical figure theory. Thuringus, who played an important mediating role up to Johann Gottfried Walther , uses the formulations of Johannes Nucius to a large extent in his Opusculum bipartitum (Berlin 1624), without naming him directly.

Works

  • Compositions
    • Modulationes sacrae , collection of five- and six-part sacred Latin chants, published by Nigri (Prague 1591, 2nd edition Liegnitz 1609)
    • Cantionem sacrarum diversarum vocum for five to eight voices, collection in two books, published by Sartorius (Liegnitz 1609)
    • Missa “Cara Theodorum” with five voices
    • Missa “Vestiva i colli” with five voices
    • Hymn "Fit porta Christi" to four voices (lost)
  • font
    • Musices poeticae, sive de compositione cantus praeceptiones , theoretical work on musical figure theory, published by Scharfenberg (Neisse 1613)

Literature (selection)

  • R. Starke: Johannes Nux (Nucius or Nucis) , in: MONTHS FOR MUSIC HISTORY No. 36, 1904, pages 195-209
  • Bernhard Widmann: Johann Nucius, Abbot of Himmelwitz. An old master of classical polyphony , Bregenz 1921
  • F. Feldmann: music theorist in his own compositions. Investigations on the work of Tinctoris, Adam von Fulda and Nucius , in: German Yearbook for Musicology No. 1, 1956, pages 39–65
  • H. Unverricht: Johannes Nucius , in: Schlesier des 15. bis 20. Century, ed. by H. Neubach and L. Petry, Würzburg 1968, pages 24–28 (= Schlesische Lebensbilder Nr. 5)
  • H. Unverricht: The motet work of Johannes Nucius , in: Schöpferisches Schlesien, Nuremberg 1970
  • D. Bartel: Handbook of musical figure theory , Laaber 1985
  • H. Lauterwasser: Christoph Bernhard's theory of composition in the tradition of the German "Musica poetica" and Italian music theory , in: Reception of Early Music, ed. by I. Stein, Bad Köstritz 1999, pages 109 to 117.

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Michael Zywietz: Nucius, Johannes , in: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.), The Music in Past and Present , second edition, personal section, Volume 12 (Mer-Pai), Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2004, ISBN 3-7618- 1122-5 , columns 1238-1240
  2. ↑ Marc Honegger, Günther Massenkeil : The Great Lexicon of Music , Volume 6, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1981, ISBN 3-451-18056-1
  3. ^ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , edited by Stanley Sadie, 2nd Edition, Volume 18, McMillan Publishers, London 2001, ISBN 0-333-60800-3
personal data
SURNAME Nucius, Johannes
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nüßler, Johannes; Nux, Johannes; Nucis, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer and music theorist of the late Renaissance
DATE OF BIRTH 1556
PLACE OF BIRTH Goerlitz
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 1620
Place of death Heaven joke