Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Niederrheinisches Musikfest.

Festival held in turn in Düsseldorf, Aachen, Wuppertal and Cologne, originating in 1817. See Festival, §3.

Niedt, Friedrich Erhard

(b Jena, bap. 31 May 1674; d Copenhagen, 13 April 1708). German composer and theorist. He came from a musical family and probably received his earliest musical instruction from his father, a harpist in Jena. On 14 April 1694 he matriculated at Jena University, where he probably read law, and he also studied music with Johann Nicolaus Bach (J.S. Bach’s cousin): he referred to himself in part i of the Musicalische Handleitung (1700) as ‘Imperial Notary Public in Jena’, but in the second part of the same work he described himself simply as ‘musician’. According to Erich Wenning (Chronik des musikalischen Lebens der Stadt Jena (Jena, 1937), i, 71), Niedt left for Copenhagen shortly before 1700, but the earliest surviving mention of his presence there is on 7 May 1704, when he applied (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to become organist at the church of St Nikolai. He probably married about this time; a son, Friedrich Ludewig, was born to him and his wife Anna Dorethea in 1706 (d 1731).

Despite Niedt’s obscurity, his few publications became surprisingly well known. This was the result at least partly of the interest of Johann Mattheson who published, after Niedt’s death, part iii of the Musicalische Handleitung, as well as an extensively revised version of part ii in 1721. J.S. Bach borrowed for his own teaching purposes Niedt’s rules for the thoroughbass (in part i), which are extant in a manuscript (in B-Bc) once owned by Bach’s pupil Johann Peter Kellner, which includes a title-page and annotations in the hand of another of Bach’s pupils, C.A. Thieme (see Schulze). Niedt’s thoroughbass method has 12 short chapters, and presents concisely the fundamentals of the practice. Equally important is his lengthy introduction (24 pages), a satirically conceived narrative, rather in the style of such writers as Printz and Kuhnau, in which he described vividly the ultra-conservative state of contemporary musical training in Germany, especially the requirement that organists devote years of practice to the German organ tablature (see Strunk for a complete English translation).

Part ii of Niedt’s treatise, Handleitung zur Variation (1706), contains substantive information about the practice of improvising over a thoroughbass, a technique of great value to organists in the 18th century. Numerous music examples show how to change simple bass progressions into various kinds of elaborate rapid passage-work. Equal attention is paid to keyboard techniques for varying chords in the right hand, and there are various demonstrations of how to improvise preludes as well as different dance pieces. Mattheson’s revised second edition adds important data regarding the register dispositions of more than 60 north European, mostly German, organs.

Part iii of the Musicalische Handleitung concludes Niedt’s practical manual for musical composition with instructions in counterpoint, canon, motet, chorale and recitative style. He also published Musicalisches A, B, C (1708), an elementary instruction manual incorporating much of the above materials. Although Niedt was active as a composer, his music is almost entirely lost. A motet, Ich will aufstehen und suchen (DDT, xlix–l), has a conflicting attribution to Nicolaus Niedt, an unrelated Thuringian composer.

WRITINGS

Musicalische Handleitung oder: Gründlicher Unterricht. Vermittelst welchen ein Liebhaber der edlen Music in kurzer Zeit sich so weit perfectioniren kan, dass er nicht allein den General-Bass nach denen gesetzten deutlichen und wenigen Regeln fertig spielen, sondern auch folglich allerley Sachen selbst componiren und ein rechtschaffener Organist und Musicus heissen könne.

Erster Theil: Handelt vom General-Bass, denselben schlechtweg zu spielen (Hamburg, 1700, 2/1710/R; Eng. trans., 1989)

[Anderer Theil]: Handleitung zur Variation, wie man den General-Bass und darüber gesetzte Zahlen variiren, artige Inventiones machen, und aus einen schlechten General-Bass Praeludia, Ciaconen, Allemanden, Couranten, Sarabanden, Menueten, Giguen und dergleichen leichtlich verfertigen könne (Hamburg, 1706, 2/1721/R, ‘verbessert, vermehret, mit verschiedenen Grundrichtigen Anmerckungen und einem Anhang von mehr als 60 Orgel-Wercken versehen durch J. Mattheson’; Eng. trans., 1989)

Theil III, handelnd von Contra-Punct, Canon, Motetten, Choral, Recitativ-Stylo und Cavaten, ed. J. Mattheson (Hamburg, 1717/R; Eng. trans., 1989)

Musicalisches A, B, C (Hamburg, 1708)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

StrunkSR

F.T. Arnold: The Art of Accompaniment from a Thorough-Bass (London, 1931/R), 213ff

P. Benary: Die deutsche Kompositionslehre des 18. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1961)

H.-J. Schulze: ‘“Das Stück im Goldpapier”: zu Bachs Generalbasslehre’, BJb 1978, 19–42

P.L. Poulin and I.C. Taylor: Introduction to Friedrich Erhardt Niedt: The Musical Guide, Parts 1 (1700/10), 2 (1721), and 3 (1717) (Oxford, 1989)

GEORGE J. BUELOW

Niedt, Nicolaus

(d Sondershausen, Thuringia, 16 Aug 1700). German composer and organist. He is first heard of in 1677, when he was engaged as a chancery clerk at the court of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen. From then until 1683 he was also municipal organist of Sondershausen, at the Trinitatiskirche. He died in poverty and without surviving relatives. He was one of the numerous competent church composers in the Germany of his day, and his music was known not only in Thuringia but as far afield as Silesia (according to MatthesonGEP), Strasbourg and Königsberg. His one publication, Musicalische Sonn- und Fest-Tags-Lust (Sondershausen, 1698), was the last big collection of German church music of the 17th century. It comprises 73 church cantatas, for every Sunday and feast day of the church’s year, each consisting of the same three sections: first a biblical passage set in concerted style for five voices and five instruments, then a ‘beautiful aria’ from one of the gospels for two trebles and bass and finally a chorus. Niedt expressly intended them for performance in villages and for as wide a range of performers as possible. He and his publisher sought to achieve this by using only German texts, renouncing ambitious compositional techniques and demanding uniformly simple forces, which could be further reduced to make performance easier still. The music was very carefully presented: bar-lines were inserted, and for greater legibility the type was made to look like manuscript. In a modern edition (DDT, xlix–l, 1915/R) five Christmas and New Year songs from manuscript collections have been attributed to Niedt (the preface to his 1698 volume mentioned the existence of several other works in manuscript). Their bipartite form of trio (SSB or ATB) and five- or six-part concluding chorus resembles that of his printed works without the opening concerted section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberNL

MatthesonGEP

WaltherML

R. Mitjana y Gordón: Catalogue critique et descriptif des imprimés de musique des XVIe et XVIIe siècles conservés à la bibliothèque de l’Université royale d’Upsala, i (Uppsala, 1911), 308ff

F.W. Beinroth: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Sondershausen von ihren Anfängen bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1943), 44ff, 61

F. Krummacher: Die Überlieferung der Choralbearbeitungen in der frühen evangelischen Kantate (Berlin, 1965)

H. Engel: Musik in Thüringen (Cologne and Graz, 1966), 32–3

D.P. Walker and P. Walker: German Sacred Polyphonic Vocal Music between Schütz and Bach (Warren, MI, 1992)

KARL-ERNST BERGUNDER