Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] 83
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Franck, Melchior(b Zittau, c1579; d Coburg, 1 June 1639). German composer. He was not born in 1573, as is often stated, but about six years later (see Peters-Marquardt). His father Hans was a painter; his mother died in 1603, an event the composer commemorated with a motet. Johannes Franck, who published a set of Cantiones sacrarum melodiarum in Augsburg in 1600, may have been an older brother. Little is known of Melchior’s early life. He may have studied music in Zittau under Christoph Demantius, Kantor there from 1597 to 1604, and may have been a pupil of Adam Gumpelzhaimer (as well as Christian Erbach, Bernhard Klingenstein and Hassler) in Augsburg. In any case he was in the choir of the St Anna, Augsburg, about 1600. In 1601 Franck moved to Nuremberg, where he taught at the Egidienkirche. The year he spent there was decisive for his career. His concern with music education resulted then and in later years in numerous collections of pedagogic vocal and instrumental music. Also in Nuremberg he was strongly influenced by Hassler, who had returned there from Augsburg also in 1601. Hassler had inherited from Lechner, his probable teacher in Nuremberg, Lassus’s Netherlandish style of motet composition and had absorbed the Venetian antiphonal style from both Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli while studying with them in Venice. He passed these on to Franck. Furthermore, the contact at one remove with Lechner is reflected in Franck’s many psalm settings. At the end of 1602 or beginning of 1603 Franck became Kapellmeister to Duke Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg, an enlightened nobleman who took a great interest in his musical establishment; no doubt he worked warmly with Franck, for whom life in Coburg was at first ideal. He published a great deal, and in 1607 he married. The Thirty Years War affected Coburg in the early 1630s, when the city and the countryside nearby were ravaged by Wallenstein’s and then Lamboy’s armies. The economy was ruined; moreover, Duke Johann Casimir died in 1633. Franck personally suffered the loss of his wife and two children. Casimir’s successor, Duke Johann Ernst, was forced to economize and, lacking his predecessor’s love of music, he quickly reduced the size and his support of the Kapelle. Franck kept his position, though his pay dwindled steadily in the following years, and Johann Ernst also appointed him to the lesser post of inspector of the choir of the city church. Franck complained about the severe times in the prefaces to his printed works, but despite receiving an offer to return to Nuremberg in 1636 he decided to remain with the duke, who invited him to reorganize his court Kapelle in Eisenach. With the failure of that Kapelle Franck returned to Coburg, where he was pensioned. Franck was one of the best composers of German Protestant music in the first half of the 17th century. He wrote both sacred and secular music for various instrumental and vocal forces: his output is vast, and a comprehensive, detailed study of his works has yet to be undertaken. Most of his music is conservative in comparison with that of Schütz or his Italian contemporaries, and he experimented with the new basso continuo only from 1627. Of 1466 known compositions, his principal works are his purely vocal motets and his dances for instrumental ensemble. He also wrote German polyphonic songs and quodlibets, German Magnificat settings, a Mass, sacred concertos, simple chorale settings and incidental music to a play. Franck published more than 40 collections of motets, more than one a year, between 1601 and 1636. Of the over 560 compositions in them, most use German translations of psalms and prophetic writings. The motets with Latin texts, all but seven of which appear in five collections published from 1601 to 1613, are also provided with German translations. The settings vary in size and style. Nearly all are performable by a cappella choir or with instruments doubling the parts; four collections include a basso continuo organ part: Rosetulum musicum, Dulces mundani exilii deliciae and the two volumes of Paradisus musicus. The motets without continuo are for three to 12 voices, most being for between four and eight; the motets with continuo are for one to eight voices, though very few are solos. In the preface to his Contrapuncti (1602), Franck explained his style of writing. He recalled that Catholic polyphony was composed in an elaborate way for the glory of God and the appreciation of the educated and that Protestant psalmody was developed for laymen and young people. The Protestant reaction to elaborate Catholic music early in the 16th century was understandable, but by 1602 the simple psalmody was well known to the layman and was well represented in print. Franck’s aim was to take the simple chorale tunes and as in the older Catholic music to ornament them for the glory of God. The 22 motets in this collection are typical of his motets in general. All the pieces are in the prima pratica: there are no unusual dissonances, and those that are used are carefully prepared and resolved. The voices move by step for the most part; the bigger leaps usually stem from the movement of the borrowed chorales. Nonetheless Franck was very expressive in his text-setting; for example, in Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir when the three lower voices sing ‘Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen’ (‘Lord God, hear my call’) in a generally low tessitura the soprano enters more than an octave higher with the same words: the cry to God soars above all else. There is some word-painting, for example a long melisma on ‘klagen’ (‘to cry out in grief’) in the motet Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, but this is not consistent. These motets reflect the influence of Hassler in the use of expressive devices and that of Lassus and Lechner in the carefully worked-out counterpoint. The unusual feature of the Contrapuncti motets is that all are fugues for four voices or instruments: on the title-page Franck clearly states that they are to be performed in a fugal way not only by voices but also by instruments. The fugal expositions always have real answers; in a few cases the entries are in stretto, and they sometimes vary slightly in rhythm. The subject is based on the first phrase of the chorale; subsequent points of imitation use the later phrases. The Gemmulae evangeliorum musicae (1623) contains very short, mostly homophonic settings of important German proverbs, less elaborate than the Contrapuncti. One piece is strophic, and many have some scheme of internal repetition (AAB, AABB, ABB, ABBC, AABCC and AABBC). In the preface Franck makes clear that he had composed these very easy pieces so that even the smallest, least expert choir could sing them. The various motets of the Melodiae sacrae (1607) strongly evince a characteristic of Franck’s music not met with in the above-mentioned collections: the antiphonal juxtaposition of groups of voices (though there are never two distinct choirs). The music is predominantly homophonic within the prima pratica, and there is some specially noteworthy word-painting, for example the effective melismas on such words as ‘fountain’ and ‘south wind blowing’ in Meine Schwester, liebe Braut. Elsewhere Franck did write antiphony for two choirs. His contribution to the wedding collection Epithalamia (161417) is a motet for two four-part choirs, and his Christmas motet Dank sagen wir alle Gotte, found in an undated manuscript, is for seven voices arranged in two choirs. Both works are essentially homophonic and contrast duple- and triple-time sections. Franck wrote many sacred occasional pieces such as these. The funeral songs among them are appropriately much more subdued. That for his friend Wolffgang Beyling (1624) is almost strictly homophonic, syllabic and scored for four voices a cappella. Each verse is set off by rests as in Lobwasser’s German psalms based on Goudimel’s homophonic French psalms. Like most of Franck’s motets, those in Dulces mundani exilii deliciae (1631) are devotional songs based on biblical texts that were performed privately for Duke Casimir and not in ordinary churches. The texture is basically homophonic, whether for one voice with continuo or for two four-part choirs with continuo. A few motets for three to eight voices, however, are more contrapuntal. Of the secular vocal pieces the most unusual are the 11 quodlibets. Composed for students, they reflect the student humour of the time. The borrowed music and texts succeed one another; sometimes only the texts are borrowed, sometimes only the music. The sources range from important works by Hassler and German art song to popular German folksongs, and sometimes Latin and German are mixed. Most of the 13 secular vocal collections also contain many purely instrumental dances, and the latter strongly influenced the former. Even when secular songs appear apart from dances, as in Musicalischer Bergkreyen (1602) and Opusculum … Reuterliedlein (1603), they are homophonic and have regularly recurring rhythmic patterns. They are strophic, syllabic, except for a few melismas on the penultimate syllables of verses, and in most cases are in bar form. Instruments can replace the voices. Musicalischer Bergkreyen is unusual in that the tenor introduces each piece. The dances, which in addition to appearing in song collections are to be found in four individual dance collections, are all homophonic. Like most dances of the time they are in the form AABBCC, with the tonality moving from tonic (A) to dominant (B) and back to tonic (C) or from tonic minor (A) to subdominant (B) and back to tonic minor (C). They are scored for four to six unspecified instruments, though viols are called for in Newe musicalische Intraden. In the Deliciae convivales (1627) a basso continuo is added. In Lilia musicalia the dances are presented in suites; elsewhere they are grouped by type. On 14 June 1630 the pastoral play Von der Zerstörung Jerusalems was performed by students in Coburg with eight intermedi with music by Franck. Though conservative, Franck’s music is consistently expressive. He did not follow the reforms of Martin Opitz, though he knew him, but he was always careful to observe proper German diction. His works were extremely popular, no doubt on account of both their simplicity and their beauty: they reappeared many times in his lifetime in various cities and in collections. The most prolific German composer of his generation, he is perhaps the most important after Schütz, Schein and Scheidt. WORKSsacred
secular
instrumental
BIBLIOGRAPHYBlumeEK MGG1 (K. Gudewill) [incl. list of MSS] R. Eitner: ‘Melchior Franck’, MMg, xvii (1885), 40–42 A. Obrist: Melchior Franck: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der weltlichen Composition in Deutschland (Berlin, 1892) K. Ameln: ‘Melchior Franck’, Der Kirchenchor, xiv (1954), 5–9 F. Peters-Marquardt: ‘Melchior Franck, ein Altmeister deutschen Musikschaffens’, Anekdoten- und Rätsel-Sammler, clxxv (1954) H. Wilk: Melchior Franck und die Coburger Musikkultur um 1600 (diss., U. of Munich, 1962) W. Rogge: Das Quodlibet in Deutschland bis Melchior Franck (Wolfenbüttel, 1965) H. Taeschner: ‘Aus den letzten Jahren Melchior Francks: Ergänzungen zur Lebensgeschichte des Komponisten’, Jb der Coburger Landesstiftung (1967), 165–74 F. Krummacher: ‘Fränkische Figuralmusik im 17. Jahrhundert und ihr Verhältnis zur Reformation’, Gottesdienst und Kirchenmusik, i (1968), 12–13 K. Gudewill: ‘Melchior Francks Newes teutsches musicalisches fröhliches Convivium 1621’, Musa – mens – musici: im Gedenken an Walther Vetter, ed. H. Wegener (Leipzig, 1969), 87–98 C.T. Aufdemberge: Melchior Franck and his two Chorale Collections ‘Contrapuncti compositi’ (1602) and ‘Psalmodia sacra’ (1631) (diss., U. of Kansas, 1970) W.J. Weinert: Melchior Franck’s ‘Geistliche Gesang und Melodeyen’ (1608): a Critical Edition with Commentary (diss., U. of Wisconsin, 1985) R.C. Sheets: A Study of Melchior Franck’s Collection of Motets and Sacred Concertos, ‘Dulces mundani exilij deliciae’ (1631) (diss., U. of Illinois, 1988) JOHN H. BARON Yüklə 17,54 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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