Severin Anton Averdonk

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Severin Anton Averdonk (actually Anton Clemens Averdonk ; * 1768 ; † 1817 ) was a German Roman Catholic clergyman and poet who represented the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution . He wrote the texts for at least one cantata that Ludwig van Beethoven composed.

Life

Severin Anton Averdonk was a brother of the court singer Johanna Helene Averdonk . He completed five high school classes in Bonn and received numerous awards. He then attended two philosophical courses at the university and began studying theology in 1789 .

Averdonk was sponsored by Eulogius Schneider . In 1790 he suggested that the Bonn Reading Society should commission a cantata on the late Emperor Joseph II in order to make the funeral ceremonies worthy. An elegy should be used for this, the Averdonk, at that time " Canonical Chapter. in Ehrenstein , candidate at the high school in Bonn ”had already written at this point. It was titled Ode to the deaths of Joseph and Elisa .

Beethoven, who was moved by the theme of the Enlightenment, then composed the cantata on the death of Emperor Joseph II. The text of the cantata on the exaltation of Leopold II probably also came from Averdonk.

Averdonk drew the resentment of the elector-archbishop Max Franz , who in 1791 called him a monk who qualified for pastoral care, but who had become a "minstrel". Averdonk was also among the poets who wrote articles in 1813 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the reading society.

After the French Revolution, whose ideals he shared, Averdonk emigrated to Alsace and was a priest in Uffholtz and president of the local Société des Amis de la Liberté et de l'Égalité . He wrote articles for Eulogius Schneider's Jacobean magazine Argos .

The quality of Averdonk's poetry is not valued highly by some later. Words such as “epigone poetry” are used, and there is talk of a now funny horror metaphor in the cantata on the death of the emperor.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Susanne Lachenicht : Information and Propaganda. The press of German Jacobins in Alsace (1791–1800) , Munich 2004, p. 152f.
  2. ↑ Ludwig Schiedermair: The young Beethoven . Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim / New York 1978, ISBN 3-487-06542-8 , p. 220 ( limited preview in Google book search [accessed on June 11, 2020] first edition: Leipzig 1925).
  3. ↑ Elliot Forbes (ed.): Thayer's Life of Beethoven, Part I . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1992, ISBN 0-691-02717-X , pp. 119 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed June 12, 2020]).
  4. ↑ Ernst Wangermann, The weapons of publicity. On the change in the function of political literature under Joseph II , Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag 2004, ISBN 978-3-486-56839-4, p. 208
  5. ^ Elliot Forbes (ed.), Thayer's Life of Beethoven, Part I , Princeton University Press 1992, ISBN 978-0-691-02717-3, p. 120
  6. ↑ Alexander Wheelok Thayer, Ludwig van Beethoven
  7. ↑ Bernhard Weck, “You will be rewarded in better worlds!” - Ludwig van Beethoven , in: Hermann Weber (ed.), Literature, Law and Music , Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag 2007, ISBN 978-3-8305-1339-1, P. 59
personal data
SURNAME Averdonk, Severin Anton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Averdonk, Anton Clemens (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Roman Catholic clergyman and poet
DATE OF BIRTH 1768
DATE OF DEATH 1817