Arti musices, Vol. 40 No. 1-2, 2009.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
The Composer Episode of Josip Andreis
Mirjana Škunca
; Split, Hrvatska
Sažetak
Only a few people, even in the immediate ranks of the profession of musicology, recognise the doyen of Croatian musicology and lexicography and long-term dedicated university professor, Josip Andreis, as a composer. That is not at all unusual because he talked very rarely about his composer experiences and attempts. And when that happened in his mature and later years, it was clear that he treated those results as the less important part of his opus. Out of respect for this attitude on his part towards his compositions, this contribution is not aimed at their evaluation; rather it should be treated as an attempt to draw attention to an interesting episode in Andreis’s biography, that is, to an unusual and insufficiently known episode along his way to the world of music and his gradual professional orientation to musicology.
According to his own words he was attracted to and preoccupied with music back in the time of his high-school education in Split. Inspired by curiosity and music talent, he had already obtained at the time - in addition to the information on music works and composers - a considerable music-theoretical education, which encouraged him to make an attempt at composing. On graduation from high school, he chose the study of Romance languages at the Zagreb Faculty of Arts and Letters but he did not neglect music - quite the contrary. During his first student years, he had already presented himself to the public as a music writer and composer. Apart from texts on music, to the best of our knowledge he then also published his compositions for the first time.
Andreis’s composition Molitva na Božić [Christmas Prayer] was published on the pages of the Zagreb journal Luč at the beginning of 1929. If that demanding through-composed composition (to his own text?) represents the realisation of his composer’s aspirations of that time, it is obvious that Andreis wanted to follow the modern stream of stressed expressiveness and of daring usage of dissonance, but without breaking the connections with the basic experiences and tradition of previous composers.
It is interesting and indicative that he almost simultaneously published the piano miniature Ples lutke [The Doll’s Dance] from his cycle Otroška suita [The Children’s Suite] as the music appendix to the Slovenian journal Nova muzika in Ljubljana, which promoted new composing tendencies. In this composition he also forms the music development in the way he did in Molitva na Božić - although simpler in every respect - by the arch’s clear form and by the balancing on the way from consonance to dissonance and back.
In the 1930s, when he graduated from university and started his high-school teacher career, Andreis engaged himself increasingly in preparing material and in writing the book on music history. Deepening his knowledge of music he undoubtedly raised standards, and formed more rigorous judgements on his composition, but he still did not give up composing. Namely, in March 1941, the Split newspaper Novo doba announced the premiere of Andreis’s Sonatine for the piano, performed by the Split pianist Estela Ivić. In the music review published after the concert, the music critic of the paper, Ambro Novak, encouraged the author and wrote that he formed music of "complex tonal structure […] following the principles of both the classical form and the modern spirit and technique", drawing also on folk elements. That evaluation allows the assumption that Andreis then began to follow the way of neoclassicism, that is, of its variant (with an overtone of /domestic/ folklore), which characterized the earlier phase of musical expression of the then already respectable domestic composers among Andreis’s age contemporaries, such as Božidar Kunc, Boris Papandopulo or Milo Cipra.
However, the score of Sonatine is not available, and there is no trace of other Andreis’s compositions in the available sources. Consequently, it is not possible to suppose what Andreis’s contribution to Croatian music would have been if by any chance he had continued to compose. But it is certain that (not only) Croatian music science and lexicography would be unimaginable without Josip Andreis.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
47781
URI
Datum izdavanja:
20.11.2009.
Posjeta: 967 *