Luca Marenzio’s Liturgical Works in Music-historical Sources from the 16th and 17th centuries on the Territory of Today’s Slovakia
Luca Marenzio’s Liturgical Works in Music-historical Sources from the 16th and 17th centuries on the Territory of Today’s Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: In the 16th and 17th centuries, the musical culture in the territory of today’s Slovakia, which was part of the historical Hungary, was closely connected with the religion of the population. After 1517, the ideas of Martin Luther’s Reformation began to spread into the Hungarian Catholic milieu from the areas of present-day Germany. These tendencies were also reflected in musical culture. Its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries can be observed in western Slovakia, in Bratislava in central Slovakia, in the mining towns of Banská Bystrica, Kremnica, Banská Štiavnica and Krupina, and in the east of the country, e.g. in the Spiš and Šariš regions, in the towns of Levoča, Bardejov, Sabinov, Kežmarok, Prešov and Košice. Today’s Slovakia maintained close cultural, intellectual and economic contacts with its neighbouring countries: Austria, Silesia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Czech and Moravian lands and also with countries with German-speaking populations. As a consequence, in the evangelical milieu (in addition to the predominantly evangelical composers), we observe the work of Catholic composers. In the Protesant repertoire, we register composers of German origin: Samuel Scheidt, Johann Hermann Schein, Heinrich Schütz, Michael Praetorius, and Melchior Vulpius, among others, as well as Italian Catholic composers: Orlando di Lasso, Andrea, and Giovanni Gabrieli, Pierluigi da Palestrina, etc. Their polychoric works were very popular in Slovakia. This is documented in particular by the Bardejov Collection of Music (BCM) and the Levoca Collection of Music (LCM) from the 16th – 17th centuries and by the preserved inventories of Catholic and Evangelical churches from the same period. In this paper, we offer a look at the liturgical works of the important Italian Catholic composer of the late 16th century, Luca Marenzio, whose works were part of the cultural environment of the Protestants in the territory of present-day Slovakia.

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