Werke fur besondere Anlasse (review)

Leonhard Lechner. Werke für besondere Anlässe. Hrsg. von Uwe Martin. (Werke, 14.) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998. [Vorwort (Konrad Ameln), 1 p.; edition (9 works, each preceded by introd., crit. report, and plates), p. 7-188; Nachwort, p. 189-91; alphabetisches Gesamtregister der Werke Leonhard Lechners, p. 193-98. Cloth. ISMN M-006-42822-9; BA 2970. DM 210.]

Though little-known today, Leonhard Lechner (ca. 1553-1606) was perhaps the finest native German composer of the late sixteenth century. His body of musical works largely comprises five-voice Italianate lieder, which were closely tied to the Gesellschaften of the Nuremberg patriciate and to the Nuremberg publisher Catharina Gerlach. Lechner gentrified the often bawdy German Gesellschaftslied, retaining its strophic design and straightforward music appropriate for amateur singers, but using texts by learned Nuremberg poets and enriching the music with Italianate features. Seven volumes and several reprints of Lechner's Neue teutsche Lieder were issued by Gerlach between 1576 and 1589, showing how craftily Lechner responded to the large urban market for secular music. Lechner exploited the music press's potential in other ways: his output also includes several printed sacred collections, plus an anthology of Italian music and two editions of music by Orlando di Lasso. Indeed, one of the main manuscript sources of his music--the "Neue geistliche und weltliche deutsche Gesänge" (a miscellany of unpublished works assembled immediately after Lechner's death in 1606)--was clearly intended for publication, as is suggested by the source's format and the title's accent on its marketable novelty.

Unlike his mentor Orlando di Lasso, Lechner fell rapidly into obscurity even by the early seventeenth century. Social changes in how music was consumed and by whom led to shifts in musical style, and Lechner's secular music, welded to the late sixteenth-century urban patriciate, soon became obsolete. This music did not conform to the newly fashionable continuo style. Moreover, Lechner's secular lieder were distant from the devotional song favored for domestic consumption in the seventeenth century and were too refined to have vestigial popular appeal. And while Lechner was a devout Lutheran, his sacred music was not part of the small repertory of sixteenth-century motets that continued being performed into the eighteenth century. Never popularized by any published anthologies of sacred music, Lechner's Latin-texted motets never achieved the ubiquity of Lasso's.

The same reasons that relegated Lechner's music to early obscurity have also hindered its renaissance in the twentieth century. Research into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German music has long favored Lutheran sacred repertory composed in Saxony. Lechner's 1593 Passion (Historia der Passion und Leidens Christi) ensured his memory as a footnote in genealogies of the genre leading up to Bach, but his secular music was forgotten. Matters began to change from the 1950s onward, thanks above all to the work of Konrad Ameln and Uwe Martin. In 1954, the first volume of a complete edition of Lechner's music was published under the auspices of the Internationale Heinrich Schütz-Gesellschaft. The edition has the same distinctive small format and binding as the Werke of Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz, also produced by the Schütz-Gesellschaft. Yet despite giving Lechner a firm place on library shelves, the edition has not raised him to the pantheon of early Lutheran composers. For the last hundred years, musicians eager to explore the Lutheran sacred tradition have performed Schein and Schütz in Lutheran services. But Lechner's predominantly secular music is so tied to sixteenth-century Nuremberg life that it has little immediacy today. Unlike the madrigals of his Italian contemporaries or the vocal concertos of seventeenth-century Germany, Lechner's lieder do not attract virtuoso singers and have been little performed and barely recorded.

Summarizing fifty years of research on the composer, the volume reviewed here concludes the Lechner complete edition and is dedicated to Konrad Ameln (1899- 1994), the founder of the Lechner Werke. Ameln carried out...