New publication about Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius Kunzen, a composer of two nations

Friday, May 27, 2016

Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann and Christiane Wiesenfeldt, eds, Der Komponist Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius Kunzen (1761-1817): Gattungen, Werke, Kontexte. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2015. ISBN 978-3-412-22275-8

Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius Kunzen was mainly active in Denmark even though he was born in Lübeck to a family that included organists at St. Mary’s Church. In 1785 he moved to Copenhagen to pursue a career in music. His opera Holger Danske was premiered there only four years later. After moving to Berlin, Frankfurt am Main (where he married the singer Johanna Margaretha Antonetta Zuccarini [1766–1842]), and Prague, he went back to Copenhagen in 1795 and was named music director of the Royal Orchestra. The oratorio Halleluja der Schöpfung was sung by every choir at the time and is one of Kunzen’s best-known works. He died of a stroke on 28 January 1817 and was forgotten soon after his death.

On the occasion of Kunzen’s 250th birthday in 2011, the music conservatory in Lübeck took a close look at Kunzen with a conference dedicated to the composer. The recently published conference proceedings shed light on various aspects of his life and works, including the key of G minor in Kunzen’s works (Siegfried Oechsle); music in Copenhagen stage productions in the nineteenth century (Jens Hesselager); the 1796 oratorio Opstandelsen (Heinrich W. Schwab); the dramaturgy of another successful work, the Singspiel Winzerfest (Michaela Kaufmann); and Kunzen’s songs (Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann).

With operas, Singspiel, symphonies, oratorios, cantatas, songs, and piano music, Kunzen’s works encompassed the entire spectrum of genres of his time. The contributions in the conference proceedings reflect this versatility and scrutinize the historical context, social functions, and stylistic changes of the period around 1800. An overview of his works, a discography, and a bibliography are included as appendixes and encourage further research on the composer and his oeuvre.

The RISM online catalog has 377 sources for Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius Kunzen, including six viewable online. And the sources are not only - as one might suspect - located at Det Kongelige Bibliotek Kopenhagen (DK-Kk) and the public library in Lübeck (D-LÜh), but are also in the United States (Library of Congress, US-Wc), Austria (National Library, A-Wn) and Poland (Warsaw University Library, PL-WRu).

Category: New publications