español | français Jacobus Gallus Brigida Bianchi: Baroque Women VII Peter Phillipps 10 CDs for a desert island : José Miguel Moreno Bach´s mass in B minor   54 - 53 - 52 - 51 - 50 - 49 - 48 - 47 - 46 - 45 - 44 - 43 - 42 - 41 - 40 - 39 - 38 - 37 - 36 - 35 - 34 - 33 - 32 - 31 - 30 - 29 - 28 - 27 - 26 - 25 - 24 - 23 - 22 - 21 - 20 - 19 - 18 - 17 - 16 - 15 - 14 - 13 - 12 - 11 - 10 - 09 - 08 - 07 - 06 - 05 - 04 - 03 - 02 - 01 - JACOBUS GALLUS The Gallus enigma doubtless lies in this curious proximity of an apparently brilliant reputation, envied in the circles closest to the Prague court, and the absence of all documents mentioning his name. Were there links with the French-Flemish composers of Prague, Jacob Regnard and Philippe de Monte? The numerous friends whose presence the composer and his brother evoke in the two prefaces of the Moralia have certainly left a tangible trace in the various prefatory texts surrounding the publications or in the poetic tombeau published by Nigrin in 1591 to the memory of the composer. But despite this numerous and attentive presence, Gallus seems to have kept himself completely apart from all court life. The inventory of his belongings after his death even suggests a relative material penury: some books of music, worn furniture. Gallus, Handl, Petelin The composer’s patronymic also is ambiguous: should one say “Gallus” or “Handl”? “Gallus”, on the majority of title-pages, seems to have been only a Latin surname of the kind humanists of the time liked to don. “Handl” is the current form that the composer himself utilised whenever he signed a document. Should one then take into account distorted handwritings of this last patronymic? Until a recent date it was in fact thought that a document in the archives of the Imperial chapel in Vienna mentioning a choirboy named Jacob Hahn (or Hann) in 1574 designated the composer. A growing number of researchers seems since to have abandoned this hypothesis on the grounds of too great a disparity of writing between Handl and Hahn. < p/> It is, finally, on a celebrated portrait, engraved in 1590, that most of the studies on Gallus converge. This document is perhaps the sole stable point of departure of all the studies devoted to the composer, and notably by reason of the inscription that specifies his age and his geographic origin: in 1590 Gallus was aged 40, and declared “Carniolian”, that isto say coming from the province of Carniola, in the south-east of the Empire. < p/> This simple fact has perhaps generated more dynamism in the bibliography than any of the documents so far mentioned. A repertoire in the public domain That the music of Gallus immediately met with very great success is attested by the number of mentions of his work throughout the 17th century. Publications in anthologies, manuscript dissemination of the work, references to the composer in treatises on composition: it seems that in Bohemia, but above all in Saxony and Silesia, for nearly half a century Gallus’s compositions continued to be sung. One has only to glance through the anthologies of Bodenschatz, Schade, Calvisius, Grimm or Praetorius to be convinced of it. Gallus was one of the virtually obligatory references in places in Central and North Germany where there was an attempt to define the conditions of a “well composed” piece of music, that is to say conforming to the rules of counterpoint while being expressive as to the perception of the text’s meaning. The evidence of the manuscripts is no less eloquent: numerous motets and unpublished Masses were copied and preserved in Wroclaw, Legnica, Zwickau or Görlitz, which indicates the importance of this region of Europe for the diffusion of Gallus’s work. Some few works then cross into the 1650s, seeming no longer to quit the polyphonic repertoire, and among these is the motet for Good Friday, Ecce quomodo moritur justus, of which more than fifteen or so sources have been preserved. Biography Work catalogue Discography Goldberg Articles ABOUT US | CONTRIBUTE   web map - home page - cover Legal warning Copyright 2003, Goldberg. info@goldberg-magazine.com