Arti musices, Vol. 48 No. 1, 2017.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/m16wjcpjv9
Ivan Zajc in the Whirlpool of Croatian Music Historiography: Towards a Monograph
Sanja Majer-Bobetko
orcid.org/0000-0001-9998-481X
; Odsjek za povijest hrvatske glazbe HAZU, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Even one hundred years since his death there is no monograph on the most prolific Croatian composer Ivan Zajc (1832-1914). The reason for this probably lies in his huge opus, to which all of Zajc’s other activities should be added: conducting, organizing, managing, and teaching. However, there exist numerous music-historiographical texts which correspond in their number to Zajc’s compositional output. This is why this paper is primarily focused on music-historiographical syntheses as they are the best sources for understanding the authors’ fundamental opinion on the composer’s activities and compositional opus as a whole. We might say that these texts constitute the »view from above« on Zajc. After Vjenceslav Novak’s (1859-1905) Povijest glazbe [History of Music, manuscript from the end of the 19th century, published in 1994] and Stjepan Hadrović’s (1863-1934) Kratka povjest glazbe [A Short History of Music, 1911], which were both written in Zajc’s lifetime, general music histories were written by Josip Andreis (1909-1982), Hubert Pettan (1912-1989), Nenad Turkalj (1923-2007) and Stanislav Tuksar (1945), while histories of Croatian music were written by Božidar Širola (1889-1956), Branimir Ivakić (1906-1943), Hubert Pettan, Josip Andreis, Lovro Županović (1925-2004), Ennio Stipčević (1959), Stanislav Tuksar, and as a curiosity, by the prominent Bulgarian musicologist Ivan Kamburov (1883-1955). Nevertheless, particular specialized studies which gradually build a path to the desired and still unachieved monograph are not omitted from the paper.
In Croatian music historiography Zajc is undoubtedly recognized as the key figure of the musical life of the city of Zagreb and as the most prominent Croatian composer of the second half of the 19th century, especially after 1870, when he came from Vienna to Zagreb. However, there are relatively few analytical approaches and interpretations of his compositional oeuvre, which, due to its extensiveness, has not been fully studied. Therefore, its re-evaluation and its analysis remain the biggest challenge for future researchers and the author / authors of the (too) long-awaited monograph.
Keywords
Ivan Zajc; Croatian music historiography
Hrčak ID:
185331
URI
Publication date:
28.7.2017.
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