Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Nice

(It. Nizza).

City in the south of France. At the crossroads of French and Italian cultures, Nice has belonged successively to Provence, Savoy (1388), France (1705), Austro-Sardinia (1706), France (1793), Piedmont (1814) and finally France (1860).

In the 18th century, the city's musical life revolved around the Teatro Maccarani and the Baroque churches, several of which still contain organs made by the Grinda brothers, renowned local organ builders. In the 19th century Nice became famous for its Russian, English and Belgian visitors, and attracted many composers, including Berlioz, Meyerbeer, who composed L'Africaine there, Wagner, Paganini and Halévy, both of whom died in Nice. Composers who have worked in Nice in the 20th century include Massenet, Fauré, Albéniz and Stravinsky, who between 1925 and 1930 composed Oedipus rex, the Symphony of Psalms and Apollon musagète in Nice. The film composer Maurice Jaubert was born in the city in 1900.

Aristocratic music salons flourished in Nice in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Baron von Derwies organized the French première of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar in his château, and the Vicomtesse Vigier (who as Sophie Cruvelli had sung Hélène in the first performance of Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes) organized the French première of Lohengrin in her Cercle de la Méditerranée (1881). By the 1870s Nice had several theatres, including the Théâtre Français, where Offenbach conducted, the Théâtre Italien, where the French première of La forza del destino was given in 1873, and by the 1880s the Casino de la Jetée-Promenade and the Casino Municipal, where Verdi's Otello received its French première in 1891 and Falla's La vide breve its world première in 1913.

The only theatre which still survives is the Opéra, inaugurated in 1885 as the Théâtre Municipal. It has staged the world premières of many works by minor composers as well as the first French performances of La Gioconda (1886), Berlioz's La prise de Troie (1890), Yevgeny Onegin (1895), Leoncavallo's La bohème (1899), Das Rheingold (1902), Manon Lescaut (1906), Shostakovich's Katerina Izmaylova (1964), Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers (1965), Janáček's From the House of the Dead (1966) and Milhaud's David (1968). A new opera auditorium, the Acropolis, was opened in 1985. It has a seating capacity of 2500 and one of the largest stages in Europe (1200 m²). The Opéra now mounts two to four of its productions here each year.

Until 1970, when it was disbanded, the orchestra of the Nice station of Radiodiffusion Française gave a number of premières of contemporary French music. The city now supports a symphony orchestra (the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice), chamber orchestras, a baroque ensemble and a renowned centre for electro-acoustic research, the Centre International de Recherche Musicale, which organizes the Festival des Musiques Actuelles. The Nice Conservatoire is one of the best in France. Since 1960 the Académie International d'Eté has drawn music students from all over the world. The city's musical prestige is further enhanced by a summer chamber music festival and the Nice Jazz Festival, founded in 1948. (OG; C. Pitt)

ANDRÉ PEYRÈGNE

Niceta of Remesiana

(b Dacia, early 4th century; d Remesiana [now Bela Palanka, Serbia], after 414). Bishop and ecclesiastical writer. Virtually all that is known of Niceta comes from a letter and two laudatory poems of his friend Paulinus of Nola (d 435). He was born during the second quarter of the 4th century and in about 371 was appointed bishop of Remesiana, where he spent the remainder of his life except for a number of brief visits to Italy. The last contemporary reference to him comes from a letter of Pope Innocent I written in 414. All Niceta's surviving works were falsely attributed to various authors until restored to him in the 1905 edition of A.E. Burn.

Among the works are a pair of sermons of great importance for our understanding of early Christian music: De vigiliis and the variously named De utilitate hymnorum or De bono psalmodiae. Before Burn's edition they were transmitted in a grossly defective version and attributed to the 6th-century Nicetius of Trier. (The second of the two appeared thus in GerbertS, i, 9–14.) De vigiliis defends the type of vigil that became popular in the second half of the 4th century, first in the Eastern Christian centres and subsequently in the West. The vigil, held in the early morning hours before the Saturday and Sunday celebration of the Eucharist, was characterized by the prolonged singing of psalms interspersed with prayers.

At the close of De vigiliis Niceta promised a sermon devoted exclusively to the psalmody of the vigils; the result is a remarkable document that warmly endorses ecclesiastical song and summarizes the entire orthodox position on the subject. Niceta first defends singing aloud in church against those who thought it appropriate only ‘to make melody in their heart’; he continues with a history of sacred song illustrated by quotations from the Old and New Testaments and closes with a unique passage that describes in some detail the manner in which edifying congregational singing is to be conducted.

Morin and Burn (1926) attributed the composition of the Te Deum to Niceta, but appear to have done so merely on the grounds of his obvious interest in ecclesiastical song.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Gerbert: Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum (St Blasius, 1784/R, 3/1931)

G. Morin: ‘Nouvelles recherches sur l'auteur du Te deum’, Revue bénédictine, xi (1894), 49–77, 337–45

A.E. Burn: Niceta of Remesiana: his Life and Works (Cambridge, 1905)

C.H. Turner: ‘Niceta of Remesiana II: Introduction and Text of De psalmodiae bono’, Journal of Theological Studies, xxiv (1922–3), 225–50

A.E. Burn: The Hymn ‘Te Deum’ and its Author (London, 1926)

G.G. Walsh, ed.: Niceta of Remesiana: Writings (New York, 1949/R)

J.W. McKinnon: Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987)

J.W. McKinnon: ‘Desert Monasticism and the Psalmodic Movement of the Later Fourth Century’, ML, lxxv (1994), 505–21

JAMES W. McKINNON