| Summary |
To musicians as to the musically aware of early sixteenth-century Europe the name Ludwig Senfl (ca. 1486-1543) was a familiar one. The protege of Heinrich Isaac, Senfl held positions at two of the major courts of his day: the Imperial Viennese and Bavarian ducal chapels. He was moreover an acknowledged master of every secular and sacred genre within the purview of educated men north of the Alps, to wit the polyphonic lied, Mass, motet, madrigal, and pedagogical setting. Senfl, despite his positions of prominence within bastions of Catholic orthodoxy, maintained a friendly theological and musical correspondence with Martin Luther, sending Luther at one point requested settings of sacred texts. Not only was Senfl's name recited in obligatory lists of "best masters" by commentators, but his compositions themselves were often reproduced in the theoretical treatises of the sixteenth century: Heyden, Glareanus, Faber, Coclius, Wilphlingseder, et al. His works survived in the living repertory of prints and manuscript copies fully seventy-five years after his death, a circumstance by no means typical in the Renaissance, a time of rapid stylistic change and constant demand for new works. The advent of continuo practice signalled the end of the tradition of live performance for the sacred works of Senfl, though his name occurred now and then in connection with that of his teacher Isaac and as author of settings of Horatian odes which figured into the curriculum of the Reformsgymnasium. It appears that within the context of pedagogy, the compositions of Senfl and his contemporaries were even sung in the original notation two centuries later by the Luneburg choir school whose members included the young Sebastian Bach. But with these exceptions, the Senfl sacred works were the dated productions of a past composer by the end of the Renaissance. His musical rediscovery occurred at the hand of the musicological pioneers of the eighteenth century: Forkel, Burney, and Gerber. By the mid-nineteenth century systematic work had begun on critical editions of scholarly standard that through succeeding generations of musician-researchers have brought the Senfl Gesamtausgabe ever closer to completion. Most prominent among the contributors to this effort are Winterfeld, Kroyer, Gerstenberg, Geering, and most recently, Martin Bente, whose studies of the watermarks and other features of the Munich choirbooks have greatly clarified many aspects of the Senfl style and chronology. Editorial emphasis to date has been on texts of the polyphonic Lieder, masses, and magnificats. Motets in general have been approached selectively, perhaps on the basis of quality and legibility of sources (the majority of items were inclusions of the Munich choirbooks), so that at the time that this project was undertaken, fully two-thirds of the repertory from this category remained untranscribed and therefore unavailable to musicians or scholars. The present study redresses this problem of availability and examines the stylistic and textual features of this large and important corpus. |
