Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] 83

Feind, Barthold [Aristobulos Eutropius; Wahrmund]

(b Hamburg, 1678; d Hamburg, 15 Oct 1721). German poet and aesthetician. His father, Barthold Feind, was a teacher of theology at the Johanneum Lateinschule in Hamburg, where his son was a student. Feind studied at the universities in Halle and Wittenberg, and received a law degree. His writings show that he was exceedingly well read with a considerable knowledge of philosophical and physiological works in German and French, and that he was familiar with a wide range of dramatic and poetic literature. Early in his career Feind travelled to France and probably also to Italy. In Hamburg, where he divided his career between law and various kinds of writing, he became entangled in local politics. Particularly through satirical writing in his weekly publication, Relationes curiosae, he criticized a powerful local demagogue, Pastor Christian Krumbholtz, who used the pulpit to align a segment of the public against members of the Hamburg Senate. Krumbholtz succeeded in stirring up local agitators who burnt Feind’s publication before the city hall. Public pressure eventually forced the Senate to ban Feind from the city. In 1707 he was hanged in effigy, and in 1708 a protesting group invaded the opera house during a performance of Graupner’s opera L’amore ammalato, with a libretto by Feind, to create considerable havoc and to stop the show. Finally, an imperial commission restored order to the city and in 1709 exonerated Feind and permitted him to return to the city from Stade where he had found employment as tutor to the son of the Swedish Baron von Welligk. Feind, who had developed strong loyalties to the Swedish and wrote favourably on their behalf, was imprisoned by the Danish in 1717 as he was caught up in the Swedish-Danish war while travelling north of Hamburg. By 1719, however, he had returned to Hamburg, where he became a Vikarius at the cathedral. An accidental fall led to his death at the age of 43.

Feind must be rated with Postel, Bressand and Hunold as an outstanding writer of librettos for the Hamburg opera in the first decades of the 18th century. He contributed texts for works by both Keiser and Graupner, as well as translating Giacomo Rossi’s Rinaldo as set by Handel. His librettos demonstrate his outspoken concern that opera must be a distinct artistic genre and not simply spoken drama set to music. Feind’s aesthetic and practical ideas about opera dramaturgy appear in Deutsche Gedichte … sammt einer Vorrede …und Gedancken von der Opera (Stade, 1708), an invaluable primary source for the history of opera aesthetics in 18th-century Germany; it also contains five librettos by Feind.

Feind opposed many of the stereotyped Baroque dramatic conventions, especially those found in French opera. He stressed a belief that individual characterization lies at the heart of opera drama. He insisted that dramatic actions of all kinds were required to stir the emotions of the audience, and he defended his frequent recourse to scenes of violence including murder and suicide: ‘Etlichen Weichmühtigen kömmt es cruel vor eine Person auf dem Theatro erstochen zu sehen und dennoch sind bey den grausamsten Executionen alle Märkte Gassen und Richt-Plätze voll’ (‘Some tender-hearted people think it cruel to see a person stabbed on the stage, and yet there are the most horrible executions filling all the market-places, alleyways, and places of execution’). Feind gave one of the clearer contemporary statements about the nature and importance in poetry of the concept of the Affections. His Deutsche Gedichte offers a lengthy, pseudo-scientific explanation of the physical nature of emotion current in much of the philosophical writing at the turn of the 18th century and based in part on Descartes’ Les passions de l’âme (1649).

In essence Feind believed that individual emotions resulted from Man’s four temperaments – the sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic – which in turn were affected by the acid–alkaline balance of the bodily fluids. Although the concept strikes one today as naive, the great weight given to these ideas by Feind is proof of the aesthetic concerns in the German Baroque for writing poetry and music with an emotional rationale. Few theorists of the early 18th century stated these ideas in as much detail, and the emotionally intense librettos by Feind are classic examples of the results of this philosophy in early 18th-century German opera.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (G.J. Buelow) [with list of librettos]

H. Schröder: Lexikon der hamburgischen Schriftsteller bis zur Gegenwart, ii (Hamburg, 1841)

G.F. Schmidt: ‘Zur Geschichte, Dramaturgie und Statistik der frühdeutschen Oper (1627–1750)’, ZMw, vi (1923–4), 129, 496–530

H.C. Wolff: Die Barockoper in Hamburg 1678–1738 (Wolfenbüttel, 1957)

D.I. Lindberg: Literary Aspects of German Baroque Opera: History, Theory and Practice (Christian H. Postel and Barthold Fiend) (diss., UCLA, 1964)

D.M. Hsu: ‘Barthold Feind's Gedanken von der Oper: an Early Eighteenth-Century View of Drama and Music’, Festival Essays for Pauline Alderman, ed. B.L. Karson and others (Provo, UT, 1976), 127–34

G. Flaherty: Opera in the Development of German Critical Thought (Princeton, NJ, 1978)

S. Leopold: ‘Feinds und Keisers Masagniello furioso: eine politische Oper?’, HJbMw, v (1981), 55–68

H.J. Marx and D. Schröder: Die Hamburger Gänsmarkt-Oper: Katalog der Textbucher (Laaber, 1995)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Feininger, Laurence [Laurentius, Lorenzo] (Karl Johann)

(b Berlin, 5 April 1909; d Campo di Trens, 7 Jan 1976). American musicologist of German descent, active in Italy. Through his father, the painter Lyonel Feininger, he grew up in Germany in an artistic environment and had close contacts among the Bauhaus school. He studied composition and the organ; 11 preludes and fugues for keyboard, composed in 1933–4, were published in 1972. At the University of Heidelberg he studied philosophy with Jaspers and musicology with Besseler, taking the doctorate in 1935 with a dissertation on the early history of the canon. His Jewish family fled Nazi harassment for the USA in 1937, and Feininger (who had been baptized in 1934) moved to Italy, settling in Trent in 1938 and devoting himself to the study of early sources of Catholic church music, especially the 15th-century Trent Codices. He was interned as an enemy alien in 1943–4; after the war he pursued theological studies in Trent and Rome and was ordained priest in 1947. He was a research associate at the Vatican Library and the Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra in 1946–9. In 1947, together with Carlo Respighi (though Feininger was the sustaining spirit), he founded the Societas Universalis Sanctae Ceciliae for the purpose of cataloguing and publishing Catholic church music from before 1800; practically all his publications were produced under its auspices. He returned permanently to Trent in 1949 and established the Coro del Concilio to perform and publicize the Roman polychoral repertory of the early 17th century; it toured widely until 1971. From about 1967 his attention was concentrated on studies of the sources of liturgical chant in an effort to preserve them from the effects of the abandonment of the Latin rite by the Second Vatican Council. He died in an automobile crash on the Brenner motorway.

Feininger’s legacy of catalogues and editions, the product of a brilliant if wayward musical intelligence, remains important. His extensive library, including many microfilms and unpublished papers, has been established as the Biblioteca Musicale Laurence K.J. Feininger in the Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent. 15 bound volumes of his transcriptions of 15th- and 16th-century sacred polyphony, containing some 3000 compositions (including nearly all the contents of the Trent Codices) are preserved, 13 at the Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra, Rome, the others in the Feininger Library in Trent; one of their notable features, shared with the editions, is a readiness to propose speculative attributions for anonymous works. Many of these suggestions seem fanciful, but some have been vindicated by subsequent scholarship (see Fallows, 1982), and others deserve serious consideration. Feininger’s work is likely to stimulate research for some time to come.

WRITINGS

Die Frühgeschichte des Kanons bis Josquin des Prez (um 1500) (diss., U. of Heidelberg, 1935; Emsdetten, 1937)

‘La scuola policorale Romana del Sei e Settecento’, CHM, ii (1957), 193–201

Repertorium liturgiae polychoralis sanctae ecclesiae romanae, i–ii: Giovanni Giorgi: catalogus thematicus et bibliographicus (Trent, 1962–5); iii: Pompeo Cannicciari: catalogus thematicus et bibliographicus (Trent, 1964); iv: Francesco Antonio Bomporti: catalogus thematicus operum omnium (Trent, 1975)

Membra disjecta reperta (Trent, 1964); Membra disjecta conjuncta (Trent, 1966)

Repertorium cantus plani (Rome, 1969–75)

‘Zu einigen Handschriften der Biblioteca Vaticana (Fondo Cappella Giulia)’, AnMc, no.9 (1970), 295–8

Il codice 87 del Castello del Buonconsiglio di Trento (Bologna, 1971) [thematic catalogue]

‘Eine neue Quelle zur Polyphonie des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Festschrift Walter Senn (Munich and Salzburg, 1975), 53–63

editions

Documenta polyphoniae liturgicae Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Rome, 1947–52)

Monumenta polyphoniae liturgicae Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Rome, 1947–52)

Monumenta liturgiae polychoralis Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Rome, 1950–74)

Documenta liturgiae polychoralis Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Trent, 1957–70)

Documenta maiora liturgiae polychoralis Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Trent, 1958–69)

Documenta maiora polyphoniae liturgicae Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Trent, 1964)

Orazio Benevoli: Opera omnia (Trent, 1966–)

Monumenta liturgiae polychoralis Sanctae Ecclesiae Romanae (Trent, 1966–75)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Curti: ‘K.J. Laurence Feininger’, Studi trentini di scienze storiche, lv (1976), 64–71 [incl. bibliography]

E.E. Lowinsky: ‘Laurence Feininger (1909–1976): Life, Work, Legacy’, MQ, lxiii (1977), 327–66

N. Pirrotta: ‘Ricordo di L. Feininger (1909–76)’, NRMI, xi (1977), 77–9

D. Fallows: Dufay (London, 1982, 2/1987), 188-90

D. Fallows: ‘Introit Antiphon Paraphrase in the Trent Codices: Laurence Feininger's Confronto’, Journal of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, vii (1984), 47–77

D. Curti and F. Leonardelli, eds.: La Biblioteca musicale Laurence K.J. Feininger (Trent, 1985) [incl. D. Curti: ‘La formazione di una biblioteca di musica liturgica’, 37–49; F. Leonardelli, ‘Da collezione a biblioteca: interventi per la valorizzazione della Biblioteca Feininger’, 90–95; P. Chistè: ‘Laurence Feininger, conservatore di beni librari’, 96–100]

N. Pirrotta and D. Curti, eds.: I codici musicali trentini: Trent 1985 [incl. N. Pirrotta: ‘Laurence Feininger: la musicologia come missione’, 12–15; O. Mischiati: ‘Ricordo di Don Lorenzo Feininger’, 16–21; T.L. Feininger: ‘Per una storia del “Coro del Concilio”’, 22–37; S. Filosi: ‘L'opera di Laurence Feininger a Trento’, 38–43]

F. Leonardelli, ed.: Catalogo delle opere a stampa della Biblioteca musicale Laurence K.J. Feininger (Trent, 1988)

A.E. Planchart: ‘Guillaume Du Fay's Benefices and his Relationship to the Court of Burgundy’, EMH, viii (1988), 117–71, esp. 142–5, 151–8

C. Lunelli, ed.: Societas universalis Sanctae Ceciliae (1947–1975): catalogo delle edizioni musicali (Trent, 1989) [incl. D. Curti: ‘Laurence Feininger, musicologo ed editore’, 7–15; C. Lunelli: ‘Le edizioni’, 17–19]

M. Gozzi, ed.: Le fonte liturgiche a stampa della Biblioteca musicale L. Feininger (Trent, 1994)

C. Lunelli, ed.: I manoscritti polifonici della Biblioteca musicale L. Feininger (Trent, 1994)

JEFFREY DEAN