Neumark, Georg
(b Langensalza, 7 March 1621; d Weimar, 8 July 1681). German poet and composer. He grew up in Mühlhausen, studied at the gymnasiums at Schleusingen and Gotha and in 1640 set out for Königsberg in order to study law at the university. On the way, however, he was robbed and for the next three years he wandered around north Germany in great poverty. He spent a good deal of time in Hamburg and in 1641 taught in Kiel; at this period he wrote his first novel. He finally arrived in Königsberg about 1643 and probably met there Heinrich Albert and Simon Dach. In 1648 he was again moving about; first he was in Danzig, in 1649–50 in Toruń, Poland, and later in Hamburg and its environs, where he met Rist. Finally he became a chancellor and librarian in the service of Duke Johann Ernst of Weimar, with whom he remained for the rest of his life. He was the chief poet there and published a great deal. He was admitted to the society known as the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft in 1653 and towards the end of his life to the Order of the Pegnitzschäfer.
Neumark wrote both sacred and secular poetry, some of it of a very high order. He himself set much of it to music and he was one of the most imaginative composers of continuo songs in Baroque Germany. In his largest and most important collection, the Fortgepflanzter musikalisch-poetischer Lustwald, the texts, mostly secular, are often imaginative variations of reform verses by Opitz, but he also experimented with old-fashioned German verse. Although some of the melodies are among the best of the time, often they are very plain. A few are French airs or Polish dances. Most of the songs have violin and viol obbligatos and ritornellos, which are frequently more interesting than the vocal parts; here he was inspired by songs by Adam Krieger requiring several instruments and by the virtuoso playing of the elder Johann Schop. Neumark probably played the viol in performances of his songs, which led him to emphasize this part. Most of the songs are strophic, and they sometimes include passages of dialogue: the wedding dance-song Wie seh' ich nicht Eufrosillen (no.84) combines a two-movement dance with dialogue, and in Belliflor (no.24) two singers sing alternate strophes with different melodies but the same bass.
Neumark's Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten and Ich lasse Gott in allem walten are standard Lutheran chorales; the former appears in Bach's cantata Gott ist uns're Zuversicht bwv197 and in a Mendelssohn cantata that takes its title from that of the chorale.
WORKS
only those including music; for others see Goedeke
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Betrübt-Verliebter, doch entlich hocherfrewter Hürte Filamon wegen seiner edlen Schäffer-Nymfen Belliflora (Königsberg, 1642), 7 songs, 1v, 2 vn, vle/bn, bc
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Georg Neumarks … Poetisch- und musikalisches Lustwäldchen (Hamburg, 16526, enlarged Jena, 2/16573, as Fortgepflanzter musikalisch-poetischer Lustwald), in the first edn 29 songs and several paired dances for 3 tpt/vn, a trbn, 2 t trbn, bc; 56 songs by Neumark and others added in the 2nd edn
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Ecloge Filirenus (Jena, 1658), funeral song, 1v, 2 vn, bc
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Eine theatralische Vorstellung (Weimar, 1662), 1 song
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Tägliche Andachtsopfer (Weimar, 1668), 100 songs on old models in pt II
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Des Sprossenden unterschiedliche sowohl zu gottseliger Andacht, als auch zu christl. Tugenden aufmunternde Lieder (Weimar, 1675), incl. chorale Ich lasse Gott in allem walten, as well as previously pubd songs
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KretzschmarG
MGG1 (C. Engelbrecht)
K. Goedeke: Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (Dresden, 2/1887), iii, 74–7
J.H. Baron: Foreign Influences on the German Secular Solo Continuo Lied in the Mid-Seventeenth Century (diss., Brandeis U., 1967)
JOHN H. BARON
Neumatic notations.
Notations formed primarily by neumes, that is, by graphic signs that represent essentially the movement in pitch of a melody. They are mainly associated with vocal music, in particular with the chant repertories of the Western, Byzantine and Orthodox Churches, and the Buddhist chant of India. (See India; Tibetan music; China and Japan. See also Notation, §III, 1; Plainchant, §2(iii); Ekphonetic notation.)
Neumatic style [group style].
In plainchant, the setting of text mainly with one neume (a group of usually two to four notes written together) per syllable, as for example in introits and communion chants. It is contrasted with syllabic style (mainly one note per syllable) and melismatic style (characterized by florid groups of notes, each sung to one syllable).
See also Text-setting.
Neumeister, Erdmann
(b Uichteritz, nr Weissenfels, 12 May 1671; d Hamburg, 18 Aug 1756). German poet and theologian. The son of a schoolmaster, he received his education at Schulpforta and the university in Leipzig, where he matriculated in 1689 to study both theology and literature. After the completion in 1695 of his inaugural dissertation, a critical bibliography of 17th-century German poets, he was appointed Magister legens at the university and delivered a series of lectures on poetry that year. These lectures were published without his permission in 1707 by Christian Friedrich Hunold (‘Menantes’) under the title Die allerneueste Art, zur reinen und galanten Poesie zu gelangen. Neumeister began his career as a pastor in Bad Bibra from 1697 to 1704; he also served in Weissenfels (1704–6) and Sorau (1706–15) before becoming head pastor at the Jacobikirche in Hamburg (1715), where he remained until his retirement in 1755.
Neumeister considered himself both a poet and a theologian. Although his early poetry shows some influence of Pietism, in his theological writings he took a strongly polemical stand against it. His importance for music history lies in the nine cycles of cantata texts that he wrote between 1695 and 1742, each containing texts for all the Sundays of the church year and many extra feasts. His first cycle was complete at the time of the poetry lectures, and two cantatas from it appear in Die allerneueste Art as examples of his genre ‘oratorio’, which is made up of biblical verses and poetic aria texts, occasionally also a chorale. This type of cantata had been widely cultivated in Germany since about 1680, and Neumeister could have become acquainted with it in the works of Johann Schelle, who was Thomaskantor in Leipzig while he was there. J.P. Krieger, Kapellmeister at Weissenfels, composed cantatas for chorus and soloists on these texts beginning in 1696, of which one, Rufet nicht die Weisheit, is still extant; this cycle of texts was not published, however, until 1726.
Neumeister’s next cycle was radically different. These he specifically called cantatas, and they consisted entirely of madrigalesque poetry for recitative and aria in the manner of the Italian secular cantata or, as he put it in the 1695 lectures, ‘a piece out of an opera’. Krieger set 79 cantatas from this cycle and performed them at Weissenfels, beginning in 1702; unfortunately, none is extant, but Krieger’s performance records indicate that they were almost all for solo voice. The texts were published separately as librettos and collectively in 1704, becoming Neumeister’s first published cycle (one example in Flemming). C.C. Dedekind had previously composed similar texts, but they had not been set to music (Steude, 1994).
Neumeister’s fame rests on his combination of these two types of text into the newer mixed cantata, which became standard in the 18th century. Although others may have combined these elements earlier, including Count Ernst Ludwig of Meiningen (Küster, 1987), it was Neumeister’s third cycle – prepared for the court at Eisenach, published in 1711 and set to music by G.P. Telemann – that established the new genre. Bach drew his Neumeister texts (for bwv 18, 24, 28, 59 and 61) from the third and fourth cycles. Other composers who set entire cycles of Neumeister texts included P.H. Erlebach, G.H. Stölzel and J.P. Käfer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
W. Flemming, ed.: Oratorium – Festspiel (Leipzig, 1933, 2/1965), 62ff
L.F. Tagliavini: Studi sui testi delle cantate sacre di J.S. Bach (Padua, 1956)
J. Day: The Literary Background to Bach’s Cantatas (London, 1961)
F. Heiduk and G. Merwald, eds.: Erdmann Neumeister: De poetis germanicis (Berne, 1978) [with biography and complete list of pubns]
H.K. Krausse: ‘“Die unverbotne Lust”: Erdmann Neumeister und die galante Poesie’, Daphnis: Zeitschrift für mittlere deutsche Literatur, ix (1980), 133–61
H.K. Krausse: ‘Erdmann Neumeister und die Kantatentexte Johann Sebastian Bachs’, BJb 1986, 7–31
K. Küster: ‘Meininger Kantatentexte um Johann Ludwig Bach’, BJb 1987, 159–64
E. Axmacher: ‘Erdmann Neumeister, ein Kantatendichter J.S. Bachs’, Musik und Kirche, lx (1990), 294–302
W. Miersemann: ‘Lieddichtung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Orthodoxie und Pietismus: zu Erdmann Neumeisters Weissenfelser Kommunionbuch Der Zugang zum Gnaden-Stuhl Jesu Christo’, Weissenfels als Ort literarischer und künstlerischer Kultur im Barockzeitalter, ed. R. Jacobsen (Amsterdam, 1994), 177–216
W. Steude: ‘Anmerkung zu David Elias, Erdmann Neumeister und den beiden Haupttypen der evangelischen Kirchenkantate’, ibid., 45–61
G. Jaacks: Hamburg zu Lust und Nutz: Bürgerliches Musikverständnis zwischen Barock und Aufklärung (1660–1760) (Hamburg, 1997)
KERALA J. SNYDER
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