Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance: Festschrift Klaus-Jürgen Sachs zum 80. Geburtstag (review)

It is hard to believe that Klaus-Jürgen Sachs is over 80, not just because he has always looked so young but particularly because he had a career as an organist before he became a musicologist, so was already 44 when he changed the world for any student of medieval music with the publication of his doctoral thesis, Der Contrapunctus im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1974). It is also hard to think that in Germany, the quintessential land of the Festschrift, he had to wait until he was 80 to be honoured in this way. His colleagues and the editors have nevertheless done him proud, with an elegant and imposing volume of almost 650 pages beautifully assembled, scrupulously edited, and blessed with a good index. With thirty-three contributors (three in French, seven in English, the rest in German), there is obviously an average length of twenty pages, which is to say that these are nearly all thoroughly solid contributions; and three of them are blockbusters of over thirty-five pages, which will surely be anthologized as object-lessons (Mark Everist on two-voice conductus, Peter Wright identifying the mysterious scribe ‘D’ of the St. Emmeram choirbook, and Ludwig Finscher laying a blueprint for the analysis of Pierre de la Rue)—which is certainly not to imply that length equals quality or that there are not other superb contributions in a volume that leads off with mandarin articles by Charles Atkinson and Michel Huglo.

Oddly enough, there is only one article that directly addresses the matter of counterpoint (Max Haas); and there seem to be just two passing references to Sachs’s other main area of interest, the size and workings of organ-pipes (Hiley and Hoffmann-Axthelm)—though one article concerns organ music (Witkovska-Zaremba) and a rather poor reproduction of two pages from the Ileborgh keyboard tablature (pp. 276–7) suggests that another article on early keyboard music was planned. Nor is there much hint of his fairly substantial interest in later music, as reported in the list of his writings—a familiar situation when publishers need to think hard about identifying a market. But the essays here amply acknowledge Professor Sachs’s impact on the study of any music from the years 1000 to 1600. Broadly broken down by topic (and more or less as reflected in the organization of the book) they cover: theory (Charles M. Atkinson, Michel Huglo, Michael Bernhard, Frank Hentschel, Christian Meyer, Rob C. Wegman, Herbert Schneider, Laurenz Lütteken); early monophony (Honey Meconi, David Hiley, Roman Hankeln); early polyphony (Oliver Huck, Mark Everist, Dorothea Baumann, Nicole Schwindt); counterpoint (Max Haas); terminology (Rudolf Flotzinger, Reinhard Strohm, Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm, Elżbieta Witkowska-Zaremba); music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Peter Wright, Jacob B. (Jaap) van Benthem, Wolf Frobenius, Christoph Flamm, Michael Zywietz, Ludwig Finscher, Martin Just, Franz Krautwurst, Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort, Bernhold Schmid, Edith Weber, Rainer Kleinertz).

The only one that stands outside that pattern concerns a certain Nicolás Ledesma—not the living Argentinian composer and tango-pianist of that name, whose distinguished career is described on Wikipedia, but a Spanish composer (1791–1883) who merits nine lines in Grove but is here discussed as though everybody should know his name. The distinctive matter is that five of his six keyboard sonatas and two of his six keyboard sonatinas end with variation sets. A solemn listing of variation sets in the piano sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven is used to show that this is fairly rare otherwise—though for anybody writing after Beethoven’s Op. 109 and Op. 111, not to mention his third and ninth symphonies, this can hardly have seemed a particularly obscure idea, even if it was hard to bring off successfully. In fact, the precedent for Ex. 3 and...