Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis - Volume 75, Issue 1, 2025

The Liber generationis is a genre of liturgical chant with the genealogy of Christ as its text. These compositions are included in sources dating from the ninth to the sixteenth century, but the genre has received little study to date. This is also the case for the 47 examples contained in sources from the Low Countries (the medieval dioceses of Utrecht, Liège, Arras, Cambrai and Tournai), one of which includes the region’s earliest example of polyphony. The current study offers a survey and in-depth exploration of Liber generationis compositions from the Low Countries. Comparative analysis, including examples from neighbouring regions, is used to demonstrate the patterns, divergences and unique combinatory variation of these compositions. The study concludes with a summary of the Liber generationis tradition, and offers a theory accounting for the unique variations found in the genre.

While the common conception is that music was a widespread pastime among the upper classes of the Dutch Republic, we still know little about music-making among the patriciate. This article sheds light on the central role of patricians in the eighteenth-century Utrecht collegium musicum. It shows that the many personal ties between the collegium and the Utrecht city council entailed an urban cultural politics in which the collegium was able to count on material and financial support for a long time. While this support contributed to the legitimisation of the collegium as a fashionable cultural society, the collegium was also supposed to enhance the city’s cultural prestige. With the opening of a council-funded concert hall in 1766, the mutual relations were put to the test, arising from a conflict between the collegium’s origin as a private elite society and the council’s vision for a public concert institution.

Some of the earliest contributors to the historiography of music in The Netherlands were professional church historians. A publication on the history of the organ in The Netherlands (Het Kerkelijke Orgel-Gebruik, bijzonder in Nederland, 1840) by the Leiden professor of church history, Nicolaas Christiaan Kist (1793-1859), seems to have been particularly influential. Some of the common misconceptions in later studies are already encountered in his work. Examples include the conviction that the organ accompaniment in psalm singing were introduced as a result of the government’s intervention in ecclesiastical matters, Kist’s positioning of the Utrecht professor of theology Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) as a cultural barbarian and a provoking troublemaker, and the idea that Calvinism in The Netherlands was in general unfriendly with regard to the musical arts – with organ playing as the most important exception.

Such claims are historically inaccurate and they rather reflect discussions on the relationship between church and state in Kist’s own time. However, Kist’s personal archive surprisingly also contains information on the building of an organ in the small village of Zoelen in 1747. Since organological literature dates this instrument on the year 1768, the aim of this research was to scrutinize the historical reliability of the found document and to try to draw some organological conclusions from the new information. In doing so, the study offers information on musical projects in connection with the organ in the years 1766-1768.

It turns out that the church of Zoelen indeed received an organ in 1747, and that its maker was most likely Diedrich Martens from Vreden (NRW). This result does not only have implications for local music history and the associated organ builders, but most importantly, it shows that the seemingly reliable source Boekzaal der Geleerde Wereld has hitherto misled most of the organological researchers.

Leander Schlegel was ‘een musicus van groote betekenis, maar stil, in zich zelf gekeerd levende […]. Het was niet de groote massa waarvoor hij speelde en schreef, maar alleen een kring van menschen die zijn kunst en streeven waardeerde’ (a musician of great significance, but a quiet, introspective living man […]. It was not the great masses for whom he performed and composed, but only a circle of people who appreciated his art and striving), as v. M. (Simon van Milligen¹) summed up his nature and life as a violinist, virtuoso pianist, conductor and composer in an obituary.² Perhaps his art was overly civilized. But do high ideal and distinction suffice to explain what a journalist rightly sighed as early as 1924: ‘Wat weet een komende generatie nog van een Verhulst, een Rich. Hol, een Leander Schlegel, een Heinze, een Sam. de Lange?’³ (What does a coming generation still know of a Verhulst, a Rich. Hol, a Leander Schlegel, a Heinze, a Sam. de Lange?) Schlegel died too early to connect with the modernist styles that emerged after the First World War. But unlike Johannes Verhulst and Samuel de Lange, he embraced the music of Liszt and Wagner that was new in his day. Although some of his compositions show that he was sensitive to the late-Romantic harmonies of Reger and R. Strauss and the breathless melodic progression that characterized much of the latter’s work, he himself, however, like Hol and De Lange, composed mainly along the lines of Schumann and Brahms. As a result, he, who was highly esteemed in Germany and Austria, was and remained a fringe figure in the Netherlands. His compositions are mentioned only briefly or not at all in overviews of Dutch music in the 19th century, and since the 1990s have featured almost exclusively on programmes of artists who want to showcase forgotten composers. Thus happened what, according to violinist and music collector Willem Noske, should never have happened: Schlegel’s music went out of fashion and practically into oblivion.⁴

Leander’s father is honoured in Altenburg with a monument. In Haarlem, the family name still adorns the Teylers Museum, but even there, of course, it refers to Hermann Schlegel. Moreover, a series of animals are named after Hermann, such as a Schlegel boa and a Schlegel crocodile. Musical Holland might also honour the (tame) keyboard lion and fine composer Leander Schlegel with a toponym or otherwise.

The Dutch reception of Bartók in the period 1945-2025 differs greatly from that in the years 1908-1945. Before 1945, people mainly focused on the role of folk music, and Bartók was controversial because of the role of modernity. After 1945, his work was admired for its synthesis of tradition and innovation. He was unanimously regarded as one of the best composers of his time. Before 1960, this tribute was partly due to the orientation of the leading composers of the time, and this perspective resulted in a selective approach to Bartók’s oeuvre. When these composers gradually faded into the background after 1970, Bartók’s music remained in the spotlight because of the perceived quality of his work, especially his pieces that were considered audience-friendly, but he no longer had any fervent advocates among composers and publicists, either verbally or in writing.