Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Noricus, Johannes.

See Agricola, Johannes.

Noringer, August.

See Nörmiger, August.

Noris, Matteo

(b Venice; d Treviso, 6 Oct 1714). Italian librettist. He wrote for all the principal Venetian theatres and his works, many of which were set more than once, were dramatically effective. In the 1670s and 80s he was closely associated with the Teatro di SS Giovanni e Paolo and the Teatro S Giovanni Grisostomo, both owned by the Grimani family. In 1686 the government castigated those responsible for mounting Pollarolo’s setting of Noris’s Il demone amante, ovvero Giugurta, which was deemed offensive on religious grounds and had to be revised. For five years after the scandal, Noris wrote librettos for Florence and Genoa, but none for Venice. In 1692 he began writing principally for the Teatro S Salvador. He wrote two librettos, Attilio Regolo (1693) and Tito Manlio (1696), for the Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici’s theatre at his villa in Pratolino, as well as a festa teatrale, Il greco in Troia, celebrating the prince’s marriage in 1689. It was not until 1697, after the successful restaging of Tito Manlio at the S Giovanni Grisostomo, that he began to write once again for the Grimani. By the 1690s Coronelli included him in a list of poetry instructors, along with Apostolo Zeno, Francesco Silvani and others. He died at an advanced age and was buried in the parish church of S Leonardo, Treviso.

Many of his works of the 1680s, in particular Il re infante and Penelope la casta, were stupendous affairs. Noris sought novel subjects and used them imaginatively: in his prefaces from the 1690s onward he vigorously attacked the promulgators of imitation, deriding those who borrowed from classical and neo-classical works. In spirit, Noris’s work has much in common with 17th-century Spanish drama.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GroveO (H.S. Saunders) [incl. work-list]

A. Bettagno, ed.: Caricature di Anton Maria Zanetti (Milan, 1970) [incl. caricature of Noris]

R.S. Freeman: Opera Without Drama: Currents of Change in Italian Opera, 1675–1725 (Ann Arbor, 1981)

H.S. Saunders: The Repertoire of a Venetian Opera House (1678–1714): the Teatro Grimani di San Giovanni Grisostomo (diss., Harvard U., 1985)

L. Cataldi: ‘La rappresentazione mantorana del Tito Manlio di Antonio Vivaldi’, Informazione e studi vivaldiani, viii (1987), 52–89

HARRIS S. SAUNDERS

Norlind, (Johan Henrik) Tobias

(b Vellinge, 6 May 1879; d Stockholm, 13 Aug 1947). Swedish musicologist. He studied with Adolf Sandberger at the University of Munich and with Oskar Fleischer, Johannes Wolf and Max Friedlaender at the University of Berlin. In 1903 he was appointed lecturer at the Borgarskola, Tomelilla, and later director (1907–14). He received a doctorate in 1909 from the University of Lund; his thesis was a study of Latin student songs in Sweden and Finland during the Middle Ages and Reformation. In 1919 he became director of the Musikhistoriska Museet, Stockholm; he also taught music history at the conservatory from 1918 to 1945 and was headmaster of the Borgarskolas folkhögskola, Stockholm (1919–31). He was the secretary of the Swedish section of the IMS (1901–14) and became a member of the Swedish Royal Academy in 1919. He was president of the Swedish Musicological Society and was the editor of Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning (1919–25 and 1943–4).

Norlind made a substantial contribution to Swedish musicology; his Allmänt musiklexikon became a standard reference work. His studies of Swedish folk music and instruments are particularly important. He was also interested in the instruments of other cultures; his Systematik der Saiteninstrumente (1936–9) describes and classifies ‘zither’ and ‘keyboard’ instruments from all parts of the world.

WRITINGS

‘Die Musikgeschichte Schwedens in den Jahren 1630–1730’, SIMG, i (1899–1900), 165–212

‘Schwedische Schullieder im Mittelalter und in der Reformationszeit’, SIMG, ii (1900–01), 552–607

Om språket och musiken: några blad ur recitativets äldsta historia [On language and music: some pages on the earliest recitative] (Lund, 1902)

Svensk musikhistoria (Hälsingborg, 1901, 2/1918: Ger. abridged trans., 1904)

Latinska skolsånger i Sverige och Finland (diss., U. of Lund, 1909; Lund, 1909)

Studier i svensk folklore (Lund, 1911)

Allmänt musiklexikon (Stockholm, 1912–16, 2/1927–8)

Erik Gustaf Geijer som musiker (Stockholm, 1919)

Jenny Lind: en minnesbok till hundraårsdagen (Stockholm, 1919)

with O. Morales: Kungliga musikaliska akademien 1771–1921 (Stockholm, 1921)

Allmän musikhistoria (Stockholm, 1922)

Kristina Nilsson, sångerskan och konstärinnan (Stockholm, 1923)

Beethoven och hans tid (Stockholm, 1924–5)

with E. Trobäck: Kungliga hovkapellets historia 1526–1926 (Stockholm, 1926)

En bok on musikinstrument (Stockholm, 1928)

‘Die schwedische Hofkapelle in der Reformationszeit’, Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf, ed. W. Lott, H. Osthoff and W. Wolffheim (Berlin,1929/R), 148–52

‘Hur gammal är den svenska folkmusiken?’, STMf, xii (1930), 5–36

Svensk folkmusik och folkdans (Stockholm, 1930)

Handbok i svenska musikens historia (Stockholm, 1932)

‘Beiträge zur chinesischen Instrumentengeschichte’, STMf, xv (1933), 48–83

‘Lyra und Kithara in der Antike’, STMf, xvi (1934), 76–98

‘Den svenska lutan’, STMf, xvii (1935), 5–43

Systematik der Saiteninstrumente, i: Geschichte der Zither (Stockholm, 1936), ii: Geschichte des Klaviers (Stockholm, 1939, 2/1941)

Dansens historia (Stockholm, 1941)

Musikinstrumentens historia i ord och bild (Stockholm, 1941)

‘Familjen Düben’, STMf, xxiv (1942), 5–46

Dirigeringskonstens historia (Stockholm, 1944)

Från tyska kyrkans glansdagar: bilder ur svenska musikens historia från vasaregenterna till karolinska tidens slut [From the heyday of the German Church: pictures from the history of Swedish music from the Vasa kings to the end of the Carolean period] (Stockholm, 1944–5)

with Å. Eliaeson: Tegnér i musiken (Lund, 1946)

Bilder ur svenska musikens historia från äldsta tid till medeltidens slut (Stockholm, 1947)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.-A. Moberg: ‘Tobias Norlind och svensk musikhistorisk forskning’, STMf, xi (1929), 5–30

C.-A.Moberg:: ‘Tobias Norlind’, Mf, ii (1949), 15–20

P. Holmström: Tobias Norlind (1879–1947) och musikvetenskapen (Uppsala, 1970)

M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET