Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]
Nicolai, (Carl) Otto (Ehrenfried)
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- 1. Life.
- 2. Works.
- WORKS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nicolai, (Carl) Otto (Ehrenfried)(b Königsberg [now Kaliningrad], 9 June 1810; d Berlin, 11 May 1849). German composer and conductor. His opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor was the most successful comic opera composed in the first half of the 19th century. As founder of the Vienna Philharmonic Concerts, at that time one of the most modern concert ventures in Europe, he set new standards of orchestral playing, and he contributed significantly to the history of interpretation. 1. Life. 2. Works. WORKS BIBLIOGRAPHY ULRICH KONRAD Nicolai, Otto 1. Life.Nicolai was the first child of the composer Carl Ernst Daniel Nicolai (1785–1854) and his wife Christiane Wilhelmine (née Lauber). Because of his mother’s physical and mental illness, the marriage was dissolved a few months after Nicolai’s birth. He grew up in the care of foster-parents until 1820, when his father took on responsibility for his education. Nicolai attended the highly regarded Friedrich-Gymnasium in Königsberg, but became so strained by his father’s attempts to make a prodigy of him that at the age of 15 he suffered a complete breakdown and had to leave. In mid-February 1826 he ran away and travelled via Memel to his mother in Breslau. She, however, was unable to look after him, and for the next two years he eked out a living as an itinerant pianist. After falling seriously ill in Stargard (Pomerania), he was helped by a local military court judge. The judge sent the impoverished Nicolai to Berlin, where he was introduced to Carl Friedrich Zelter, a friend of Goethe and director of the Sing-Akademie. Zelter resolved to support Nicolai and obtained for him a place at the Institut für die Ausbildung von Organisten und Musiklehrer, where he received tuition from three renowned teachers: Emil Fischer (singing), Ludwig Berger (piano) and Bernhard Klein (composition). By 1833 he had acquired a thorough grounding in composition, as the numerous songs (especially the six collections opp.3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and 16), unaccompanied choral pieces (including the three collections opp.6, 10 and 17) and larger works with orchestra, such as the Te Deum, bear witness. His development was also influenced by membership of the Berlin Sing-Akademie, the Jüngere and the Ältere Liedertafel and the Lieder-Verein 1829. Through these institutions he formed a valuable circle of acquaintances, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Karl von Bunsen, Georg Poelchau and the Mendelssohn family. He spent the summer months of 1830 and 1831 on the estate of Adolph von Münchhausen in Neuhaus Leitzkau, from where he undertook profitable journeys to Leipzig and Poznań. The Prussian ambassador Karl von Bunsen eventually persuaded Nicolai to move to Italy. From January 1834 to March 1836 he held the post of organist at the embassy chapel in Rome. At the same time he studied counterpoint and a cappella style with Giuseppe Baini, acquired the nucleus of his considerable collection of early music and took a lively interest in the development of contemporary Italian music. When his period of employment came to an end he had already been nominated honorary music director of the Prussian court, but he stayed on in Italy as a freelance composer for more than a year, searching in vain for a commission to write an opera. Apart from composing a few occasional works, the only success of these years was his appointment to the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna as maestro compositore onorario (a title that Mozart too had held). After many disappointments he was eventually elected assistant Kapellmeister at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna in 1837. Nicolai’s first stay in Vienna benefited him in two ways. He gained experience in conducting opera and orchestral works, which brought him rapid recognition; and he composed his first opera, Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, which provided him with his first success as a composer in Vienna and Italy. This, however, did not occur until two years later when Nicolai, having left Vienna, attempted to settle in northern Italy as a freelance composer. The opera, under its new title Enrico II, earned him a succès d’estime at its première in Trieste in November 1839; but his second opera, Il templario, was received with rapturous enthusiasm in Turin at its première in February 1840. He had become a famous composer overnight (at the same time, incidentally, as Verdi). His third opera, Gildippe ed Odoardo, received its première in Genoa in December 1840; it was followed by Il proscritto at La Scala, Milan, in March 1841 (Nicolai had rejected the libretto of Nabucco, which he considered unsuitable for opera, thus leaving the way clear for Verdi). Both Gildippe ed Odoardo and Il proscritto owe much stylistically to Bellini and Donizetti. Personal disagreements and the failure of his engagement to the singer Erminia Frezzolini caused Nicolai to leave the country in spring 1841, and once again he was drawn to Vienna. After his experiences in Italy, Nicolai soon changed his artistic ideals. In late summer 1841 he was appointed principal conductor of the Hofoper at the Kärntnertor, and was able to concentrate on the operas of Mozart and Beethoven, which he particularly admired. Required by contract to compose German operas, Nicolai (because of a lack of suitable librettos) could at first fulfil his obligation only by producing completely revised versions of Il proscritto and Il templario, which were performed in German as Die Heimkehr des Verbannten (1844) and Der Tempelritter (1845) respectively. Though these revisions are not entirely convincing, they represent an important point on the way to Nicolai’s first original German opera, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor. Begun in 1846, it draws on many characteristics of the European operatic tradition to create a new, independent genre. The Philharmonic Concerts, which Nicolai had been giving with members of the opera orchestra since spring 1842, caused an even greater stir. Only ‘classical’ music was played: a small repertory of works by Beethoven and Mozart, with the occasional performance of works by other composers. Concertos and Italian bel canto opera were ignored. The two performances he gave of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in March 1843 were considered to be the first modern and complete interpretation of this epoch-making work (predating by some years Wagner’s noted performance at Dresden on Palm Sunday 1846). In summer 1844 Nicolai undertook a long journey via Prague, Dresden (where he heard accounts of Wagner’s recent successes), Leipzig and Berlin to Königsberg, where he performed the Kirchliche Fest-Ouvertüre (on the chorale ‘Ein feste Burg’ for chorus and orchestra), which he had dedicated to his native town, as part of the festival to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the university. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia was so impressed that he tried to tempt him to Berlin; Nicolai, however, did not at first respond to the offer. Only when a violent argument with the leaseholder of the Viennese theatre, Carlo Balochino, about the performance of Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor had caused Nicolai’s contract not to be renewed did the king’s plans become reality. After a successful farewell concert, in which Jenny Lind took part and which included the première of the Moon Chorus (‘O süsser Mond’), the Midges’ Dance (Mückentanz) and the dance of the elves from Act 3 of the new opera, Nicolai left Vienna in 1847. October 1847 saw him installed as Kapellmeister at the Königliches Opernhaus in Berlin and, as Mendelssohn’s successor, artistic director of the cathedral choir. Wishing to reform Prussian church services, he immediately began to compose a series of large-scale religious works. Preparations for the première of Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor were interrupted by the March Revolution of 1848. Soon afterwards Nicolai joined the Tonkünstlerverband, a society concerned with the reorganization of Prussian musical life; Die lustigen Weiber eventually received its première, without huge success, on 9 March 1849. Two months later, on 11 May, Nicolai died. On the same day he was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste, but too late to receive the news.
Nicolai absorbed a great variety of influences and, in his most successful works, created from them his own individual idiom. Stylistically, he kept to the traditions of the forms in which he composed. Classicism dominates the early works of the Berlin years; the songs and small-scale choral pieces follow Zelter’s ideals and the larger choral works show the influence of Handel. His musical language was also strongly influenced by Mozart, Beethoven and Weber. The songs composed between 1827 and 1833 are carefully distinguished by the use of the terms ‘Lieder’ and ‘Gesänge’. The lieder are exclusively strophic, composed according to the ideals of Zelter and of Goethe, who saw the ‘true expression’ of the lied to be ‘that the singer can bring out the different means of the individual strophes of a melody, thereby performing the function of both the lyric and the narrative poet’ (diary, 1801). This ideal contrasts with the musically free, through-composed form of the Gesang, in which Nicolai also gave more importance to the piano accompaniment. In addition, Nicolai was influenced by his study of the folksong collections of Anton Zuccalmaglio, Johann Büsching and Friedrich von der Hagen. The profound impression made on him by performances in Berlin of Handel’s music is most clearly perceptible in the large-scale Te Deum (1832), written in a Baroque style modelled on the oratorios Messiah and Israel in Egypt. The later Kirchliche Fest-Ouvertüre op.31 also shows the influence of Handel, but enriched by contrapuntal elements deriving from Nicolai’s interest in the works of Bach. During his years in Italy Nicolai attempted in a cappella works to imitate the austerity of the ‘Palestrina style’, although this led inevitably to stylistic conflicts. For example, the eight-part Pater noster op.33 is impressive for the skilful evocation of the sound of the stile antico, but the harmony continually vacillates between modality and the key of D minor. In the Piano Sonata, the String Quartet and the works for orchestra Nicolai was influenced by the Viennese Classical composers, whose works he regarded as sacrosanct. He used specific works as models: in the Symphony in D, for example, the slow introduction and the exposition of the main theme take the form used in similar sections of Beethoven’s Second Symphony, while in the finale the striking quotation of the central themes of the preceding movements derives from the style of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In the Piano Sonata Nicolai also made use of other models: the slow movement is a Romantic nocturne inspired by the works of Chopin; there is an arrangement of a Swedish folktune; and the last movement is a rondo in the style of Weber. In his treatment of sonata form as a whole, Nicolai followed the theorist Heinrich J. Birnbach, whose essays (published in Berlin in 1827) had been a revelation to him. The operas betray Nicolai’s admiration of Bellini. He attempted to imitate Bellini’s characteristic musical language, for example – as in Norma – in melodies that are related to one another and in the intensification of sound, and in the use of comparatively few coloratura passages. The late works of Rossini, in particular Guillaume Tell (well known to Nicolai from the time of his first Viennese appointment), also left a clear mark, while the always perceptible tone of German opera (as exemplified by Weber) is in curious contrast to these stylistic adaptations. It is especially prominent in Il templario, whose overture is strongly reminiscent of the overture to Der Freischütz. The later sacred works composed in Berlin, on the other hand, are stylistically similar to those of Mendelssohn. The settings of Psalms xxxi and xcvii show a pleasing synthesis of the a cappella style of the 17th and 18th centuries and romantic Liedertafel songs. Many of Nicolai’s works, despite their craftsmanship, are little more than eclectic imitations. Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, however, described by Nicolai (using E.T.A. Hoffmann’s term) as a ‘comical fantastical opera’, reveals his fluent manipulation of recent European music traditions, and his creation, through a lively and convincing synthesis, of a truly German opera buffa. Nicolai had worked towards, and finally achieved, this result through the adaptation of his Italian melodrammi as German tragic operas. The fusion of the learned German tradition with Italian facility, the ideal that he himself repeatedly formulated in letters and some remarkable essays, resulted in a masterpiece of memorable and appealing music. Besides his activities as a composer and as a conductor, Nicolai published five essays that range widely and closely reflect his intellectual and artistic world. They include a detailed account of the Cappella Sistina; aesthetic reflections on German and Italian music; a historical study of the German folksong Annchen von Tharau; and comments on performing practice in the recitatives of Mozart’s operas. Nicolai, Otto WORKSfor full list see Konrad (1986) operas
sacred
secular choral
other vocalfor solo voice and piano unless otherwise stated
other works
Nicolai, Otto BIBLIOGRAPHYH. Mendel: Otto Nicolai (Berlin, 1866, 2/1868) B. Schröder, ed.: Otto Nicolais Tagebücher nebst biographischen Ergänzungen (Leipzig, 1892) G.R. Kruse: Otto Nicolai: ein Künstlerleben (Berlin, 1911) W. Altmann, ed.: Otto Nicolai: Musikalische Aufsätze (Regensburg, 1913) W. Altmann, ed.: Otto Nicolai: Briefe an seinen Vater (Regensburg, 1924) G.R. Kruse: ‘Otto Nicolais “Lustige Weiber” … mit unbekannt gebliebenen Nummern’, Die Musik, xxviii (1935–6), 886–94 W. Altmann, ed.: Otto Nicolais Tagebücher (Regensburg, 1937) E. Schliepe: ‘Das wiederentdeckte “Tedeum” von Otto Nicolai’, Die Musik, xxxi (1938–9), 246–51 W. Jerger, ed.: Briefe an die Wiener Philharmoniker (Vienna, 1942), 11–19 W. Virneisel: ‘Otto Nicolai als Musiksammler’, Festschrift Max Schneider zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. W. Vetter (Leipzig, 1955), 227–40 J.W. Klein: ‘Verdi and Nicolai: a Strange Rivalry’, MR, xxxii (1971), 63–7 A. Goebel: Die deutsche Spieloper bei Lortzing, Nicolai und Flotow (diss., U. of Cologne, 1975) K.-F. Dürr: Opern nach literarischen Vorlagen: Shakespeares ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in den Vertonungen von … Nicolai … und Verdi (Stuttgart, 1979) U. Konrad: Otto Nicolai (1810–1849): Studien zu Leben und Werk (Baden-Baden, 1986) U. Konrad: ‘Otto Nicolai und die Palestrina-Renaissance’, Palestrina und die Idee der klassischen Vokalpolyphonie im 19. Jahrhundert: Frankfurt 1987, 117–42 J. Liebscher: ‘Biedermeier-Elemente in der deutschen Spieloper: zu Otto Nicolais “Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor”’, Mf, xl (1987), 229–37 U. Konrad: ‘Die Philharmonischen Konzerte unter Otto Nicolai: die Gründungszeit (1842–1847)’, Klang und Komponist, ed. O. Biba and W. Schuster (Tutzing, 1992), 45–57 U. Konrad: ‘Zwischen Zelter und Palestrina, Beethoven und Bellini: Anpassung und Eigenständigkeit im Schaffen des Komponisten Otto Nicolai (1810–1843)’, Deutsche Musik in Ost- und Südosteuropa, ed. G. Adriányi (Cologne, 1997), 137–64 Yüklə 10,2 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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, the Mass in D and the Symphony in D are noteworthy.