hrvatski

Prva hrvatska Povijest glazbe

The Library of the Zagreb Academy of Music keeps the manuscript of the first Croatian History of Music whose author is the outstanding Croatian novelist and musician Vjenceslav Novak (1859-1905). It was written between 1894 and 1900 owing to the purchase of the Directory of the Croatian Music Institute, whose teacher Novak was at that time. The manuscript is incomplete (pp. 54-73 and 218 are lacking), it encompasses 237 pages in all, and it entered the Music Academy Library in 1945 under unknown circumstances. It has no original title and according to remarks in the manuscript it was reviewed by two unknown persons. Models and wources for Novak's history are August Wilhelm Ambros (Novak was a Prague student in music), Robert P. J. Musiol, Emil Naumann and, expecially, Bernhard Kothe with his work Abriss der allgemeinen Musikgeschichte fuer Lehrerseminare und Dilettanten (Leipzig 1874). By its division of the history of music into three great epochs (Music of Ancient Peoples; Christian Music; The Age of Flowering of Dramatical and Classical Music, and, the Newest Endeavours). Novak shows also Guido Adler's influence. Novak was an evolutionist who believed into progress in music: he was a partisan of music history as a history of an art which was developing from simpler to complicated, from lower to higher forms. The special value of Novak's history is his attempt to incorporate histories of South Slavic musics, especially the Croatian one, into a general history of music. In this he used mostly printed works (e. g. Ilirski glazbenici /Illyrian Musicians/, Zagreb 1893) by the contemporary Croatian musicologist Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834-1911), but did not take advantage of his valuable manuscripts such as, e. g., Građa za biografsko-muzikografski slovnik (Material for a Biographical-Musicographical Dictionary). Novak successfully used recognized authorities as models for his music history and brought basic ideas of the contemporary music historiography of the time in clear Croatian language and uncodified music terminology. But, owing to a lack of time and being under pressure, he did not finish and sufficiently elaborate his manuscript which seems to be the main reason for the fact that it was never published as a manual. Today the History of Music by Vjenceslav Novak has no didactical or any other practical value, but represents an interesting historical testimony to the state of musical historiography in Croatia at the end of the 19th century.

povijest; glazba; historiografija; hrvatska; Novak

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