Johannes de Cleve

Johannes de Cleve (* 1528 or 1529 probably in Kleve ; † July 14, 1582 in Augsburg ) was a Franco-Flemish composer , conductor and singer of the Renaissance .

Live and act

In the case of Johannes de Cleve, the city or duchy of Kleve cannot be proven as the place of birth, but it is very likely because of the inscription on his tomb ("Johis de Cleve ... excellens de Cleve Musicus") and because of its naming in musical compilations ("Clivensis"); the same grave inscription also gives the approximate year of birth when it says here: "Aeta 53". It is uncertain whether he is related to a musician with the same family name in Bergen op Zoom ; the music researcher Edmond Vander Straeten pointed out as early as 1867 that the name “de Cleve” occurs more frequently in the Flemish region.

No information has survived on de Cleve's family origins or on his school and training time. The existence of a composition by him in the manuscript archive of St. Pieterskerk in Leiden and of two motets in the first and third books of the Ecclesiasticarum cantionum collection , both published by Tielman Susato in Antwerp in 1553 , suggest that de Cleve was a first Had creative period in the Netherlands. From 1553 there is evidence of his activity as a singer ( tenor ) in the court orchestra of Emperor Ferdinand I (1503–1564) in Vienna . With Ferdinand's commission, Johannes de Cleve recruited eight new singers for the Vienna court orchestra in the Netherlands in 1559/60; He also dedicated the two books with four to six-part Cantiones sacrae to the emperor .

When Emperor Ferdinand died in 1564 and the court orchestra was dissolved, his son, Archduke Karl II (1540–1590) , founded his own new court orchestra in Graz and appointed Johannes de Cleve as its director. The composer held this office for six years until he left here at his own request in 1570 due to physical weakness; but he probably still lived in Vienna at first. Archduke Karl had honored de Cleve's services to the court orchestra when he left with a lifelong annual pension payment of 200 guilders , albeit with the obligation that de Cleve should continue to provide compositions for the court orchestra. There is a letter of Cleves from 14 March 1576 to Johann Rasch, the organist of the Vienna Schottenkloster associated Church of Our Lady , in which he asks, "to raise the 600 guilders, as it next summer, and some years, like another Place want to try ”.

There is evidence of the composer's stay in Augsburg from April 1579, where he apparently lived without a job; he fulfilled his obligation and dedicated the work Cantiones seu harmoniae sacrae , published in 1579 , to his former employer. He worked as a music teacher until his death, among other students as a teacher of the Augsburg cathedral music director Bernhard Klingenstein .

meaning

Johannes de Cleve stands in the tradition of the Dutch vocal polyphony , with the contrapuntal- linear style particularly evident in his motets; here, however, it is consciously combined with more modern stylistic means. In de Cleves' early compositions, the imitating style has a clear priority: in the six-part motet “Mirabilia testimonia tua” there is a canon in the ninth between the two tenor voices - a reminder of the style of the Josquin generation. The more modern stylistic devices of the later works include a correct text declamation , a conscious use of rhetorical figures and occasionally an expressivity created with words. The composer shows such a comparatively modern treatment of the text in his Gospel motets. In the motet “Ego sum veritas et vita”, for example, a text is set to music that comes partly from the Gospel and partly from an Office antiphon . In the motet “Filiae Jerusalem”, the beginning of the work is repeated musically and rhetorically at the end of the 2nd part, creating a framing structure.

In the earlier masses , de Cleve used a style that was imitating and, as in the motets, a style that tended towards fullness of sound (example: the parody mass “Dum transisset sabbatum” with six voices based on its own motet). Later such works show a more homophonic and syllabic trait, in which a contrapuntal voice guidance is still present (example: the mass “Vous perdes temps” with four voices based on a chanson by Claudin de Sermisy ). De Cleve's 20 four-part movements on Protestant hymns (eight by Martin Luther ), which were published in 1574 in the Gesang Postill by the Graz pastor Andreas Gigler, are remarkable . Here Johannes de Cleve's way of composing shows itself more from the conservative side: the cantus firmus is in the tenor and is accompanied by three contrapuntal voices that imitate themselves. Voice guides and a harmonization that is based on church standards refer to earlier models. The use of Gregorian chant as a cantus firmus in the tenor of mass compositions has a similarly conservative effect . In the opinion of musicologists, the stylistic diversity encountered in Johannes de Cleve also appears to originate from the composing members of the Graz band, whose diversity the composer took as a starting point to experiment with the various types of composition.

Works (chronological)

• 1 motet for four voices in the “Liber primus ecclesiasticarum cantionum”, Antwerp 1553
• 1 motet for four voices in the “Liber tertius ecclesiasticarum cantionum”, Antwerp 1553
• 1 motet with four voices in the “Quartus tomus Evangeliorum” with four to six voices, Nuremberg 1555
• 1 motet with six voices in “ Novum et insigne opus musicum ” with four to six voices, Nuremberg 1558
• “Cantiones sacrae” with four to six voices, 2 books, Augsburg 1559
• Missa super “Dum transisset sabbatum” with six voices in “Praestantissimorum artificium lectissimae missae” with five to six voices, Wittenberg 1568
• 1 motet with five voices in “Novi thesauri musici” with four to eight voices, Volume 1, Venice 1568
• 3 motets with four to eight voices in “Novi atque catholici thesauri musici” with four to eight voices, Volume 2, Venice 1568
• 1 motet with seven voices in “Liber quintus & ultimus” with four to eight voices, Venice 1568
• 20 tenor movements for hymns with four voices in “Gesang Postill”, Graz 1574
• “Cantiones seu harmoniae sacrae” with four to ten voices, Augsburg 1579
• 2 motet intabulations in the "tablature book on organs and instruments darinne", Leipzig 1583
• Missa super "Vous perdes temps" with four voices (no year)
• 12 different works in manuscript form

Literature (selection)

• Edmond Vander Straeten: La musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siècle , Brussels 1867–1888
• H. Leichtentritt: History of the Motet , Leipzig 1908, pages 90–94 (= small handbooks of the history of music by genre, No. 2)
• Helmut Osthoff: The Dutch and the German Choral Song (1400–1640) , Berlin 1938
• HJ Moser: Johannes de Cleve as composer of ten Lutheran melodies. In: Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor nederlandse muziekgeschiedenis No. 16, 1946, pages 31–35
• HJ Moser: Music in early Protestant Austria , Kassel 1954
• Hellmut Federhofer: Cleve, Johannes de. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , page 289 and following
• H. Wiens: Music and music care in the Duchy of Kleve. In: Music in the Dutch-Low German area, edited by KG Fellerer, Cologne 1960, pages 20–30 (= contributions to Rhenish music history no. 36)
• W. Suppan: Article by Johannes de Cleve. In: Steirisches Musiklexikon, edited by W. Suppan, Gran 1962, pages 70-71
• Hellmut Federhofer: Musician and musician at the Graz Habsburg court of the Archdukes Karl and Ferdinand of Inner Austria (1564–1619) , Mainz 1967
• Wolfgang Krebs: The Latin Gospel Motet. Repertoire, sources, musical rhetoric and symbolism , Tutzing 1995 (= Frankfurt Contributions to Musicology No. 25)
• Elisabeth Th. Hilscher-Fritz: Cleve, Johannes de , in: Österreichisches Musiklexikon, online edition, Vienna 2002, print edition: Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-7001-3043-0

Web links

• Works by and about Johannes de Cleve in the catalog of the German National Library
• Sheet music in the public domain by Johannes de Cleve in the Choral Public Domain Library - ChoralWiki (English)

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1. ↑ The music in past and present (MGG), person part Volume 4, Bärenreiter and Metzler, Kassel and Basel 2000, ISBN 3-7618-1114-4
2. ↑ Marc Honegger, Günther Massenkeil (ed.): The great lexicon of music. Volume 2: C - Elmendorff. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau a. a. 1979, ISBN 3-451-18052-9 .