Original scientific paper
FRIAR BONE RAZMILOVIC AND THE FRANCISCAN MUSICAL BAROQUE IN CROATIA
Ennio Stipčević
; Zagreb, Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti
Abstract
The history of Croatian music up until the Croatian Revival was regarded and presented to the public by Croatian musicologists as a series of separate and discontinued phenomena, and cultural and musical situations in which outstanding individual "personalities" were prominent to a greater or lesser degree. Friar Bone (Bonaventura) Razmilović (appr. 1626- 1678), a monk in the Franciscan monastery at Poljud in Split., was one of numerous "minor" creative spirits in Croatian culture, whose work urges one to revise some established musicological and mel11odological viewpoints. Prof. Kruno Prijatelj, PhD, the arts historian, was among the first to appreciate the autochthonic values in Razmilović's meticulous and skilfully refined miniatures in his numerous illuminations which exude an identifiable provincialism and regionalism. Razmilović's main works are the illuminations of two lavishly embellished manuscript chorales (Psalterium I, dating from 1670, and Psalterium II from 1675), kept in the Poljud Francsican Monastery, and five initials in Graduate et antiphonarium de sanctis, also in manuscript from, kept in the Franciscan Monastery at Hvar. In this study, efforts are made to consider the fact that Razrnilović's lavish illuminations are located in fairly large manuscript musical-liturgical handbooks relating to the overall musical situation at that time in Croatia. Namely, in the second half of the 17th and during the 18th centuries the dominant musical style in Croatia was the so-called Franciscan Baroque, a style which was simple in its aesl11etic and expressive pervasion. However, the culturological dimension of the Franciscan musical Baroque in Croatia is of great importance: it was the style of unpretentians sacral music, often also akin to local folk expression, by which, in one aspect, all the Croatian regions were linked wherever priestly and pastoral duties were performed by Franciscans. The musical activity of the Franciscans was built into the foundations of later musical events, particularly the politically stormy ones in the first decades of the 19th century. Razmilović's musical-liturgical manuscripts, despite their being, at first glance, unattractive from the musicalogical aspect (the examples are transcriptions from uniform Vatican editions), nonetheless have their place in the domestic Baroque manuscript tradition and in the specific aesthetics of the Franciscans. Razmilović's work is an authentic masterpiece in the structure of Croatian Baroque culture.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
116803
URI
Publication date:
12.10.1992.
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