Stephan Zirler

Stephan Zirler (* around 1520 in tube ( Lower Bavaria ), † the end of July 1568 in Heidelberg ) was a German composer of the Renaissance and court official in the Palatinate .

Live and act

No information has been passed on about Stephan Zirler's youth or training. He was most likely a member of the Augustinian choir in Rohr; the first verifiable information is his enrollment at the University of Heidelberg on September 26, 1537. According to the composer Georg Forster (in his foreword to the collection of fresh teutsche Liedlein II – IV) he was together with Caspar Othmayr , Jobst von Brandt and Forster Student of Lorenz Lemlin and under this a member of the Heidelberg court orchestra. After Forster left the city of Heidelberg in 1531, Zirler must have joined the court orchestra by 1530 at the latest.

Thereafter the composer became an electoral court official. He is mentioned in the court documents in 1549 as a chancellery relative , in 1552 as a Palatine messenger , in 1556 as a councilor and in 1564 as a chamber secretary . Zirler had married a daughter of the electoral councilor Sebastian Hügel ; their mother was a niece of the reformer Philipp Melanchthon . He lived in a house in the Floringäßlein , and on July 25, 1564 (with the consent of the Elector) he bought the garden in front of the lower or Speier Gate from the University's Collegium Artistarum , which was also called hortus circa St. Petrum . Zirler were later assigned various diplomatic tasks by his employer after the introduction of the Reformation in the Palatinate to church political disputes. For example, he was commissioned to obtain an expert opinion from Philipp Melanchthon in Wittenberg .

meaning

The musician Stephan Zirler was honored by the humanist Jakob Micyllus in a poem of praise that includes 20 distiches . In addition, however, the musical and professional assessment of the composer by contemporaries and posterity was not always positive. Georg Forster judged Zirler's songs in the foreword to the fourth part of the Frischen teutschen Liedlein dedicated to Zirler as “lovely, but bad”. On closer inspection, these show a certain freshness in finding the melody, but contain clumsy, sometimes even incorrect, twists in counterpoint . Thus, Zirler cannot necessarily be called an outstanding composer. When Robert Eitner even the judgment is "dry and mostly without appeal". Zirler, like Othmayr and von Brandt, never worked full-time as a musician. In the few sentences that have come down to us, however, there are examples of the most important song types of his time, and the security of his compositional style shows that he had good compositional training and the persistent use of the songs of his time. It is not yet certain that the composer was also the poet of his songs, as the statement by Micyllus suggests.

Works

• Preserved compositions
  • 20 song movements with 4 voices in G. Forster, Fresh teutsche Liedlein Part II – IV, Nuremberg 1540–1556
  • Song set “Bewar mich Herr” for four voices, Regensburg
  • Set of songs "Mein selbs bin ich nit gwaltig" with four voices, Regensburg
  • The First Book of Newerleßner Lautenstück , Strasbourg 1572
• Compositions not preserved (from the Heidelberg Kapellinventar)
  • Motet “Felix illa dies” with six parts
  • Motet “Homo natus de muliere” with four parts

The song “I don't know how” mentioned in this inventory is not attributable to Stephan Zirler, but to Martin Zilte.

Literature (selection)

• Jacob Micyllus: Sylvarum libri quinque . Frankfurt am Main 1564, pp. 424-426 ( digitized version ).
• Carl Philipp Reinhardt: The Heidelberg song masters of the 16th century (= Heidelberg studies for musicology. 8). Bärenreiter, Kassel 1939, DNB 362130191 (also Phil. Diss., Heidelberg 1939).
• Siegfried Hermelink : A list of music from the Heidelberg court orchestra from 1544 . In: Georg Poensgen (Ed.): Ottheinrich. Commemorative publication for the 400th anniversary of his electoral days. Association of Friends of the Student Union of Heidelberg University, Heidelberg 1956, OCLC 1006278914
• Gerhard Pietzsch: Sources and research on the history of music at the Electoral Palatinate Court in Heidelberg until 1622 . Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz 1963, OCLC 214947038 .
• Siegfried Hermelink:  Zirler, Stephan. In: Friedrich Blume (Hrsg.): The music in past and present (MGG). First edition, Volume 14 (Vollerthun - Zyganow). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1968, DNB 550439609 , Sp. 1319–1320 (= Digital Library Volume 60, pp. 83219–83222)
• Siegfried Hermelink, SL:  Zirler, Zyrlerus, Stephan. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 17 (Vina - Zykan). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-7618-1137-5  ( online edition , subscription required for full access)

Web links

• Literature by and about Stephan Zirler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Sheet music and audio files by Stephan Zirler in the International Music Score Library Project