Ivan Lukačić

„Ivan Lukačić is universally considered one of the most important of the older Croatian composers. And yet, this is the very first book concerning Lukačić and his collection of motets Sacrae cantiones (1620) to have been published. There are several reasons for this. It is possible that potential researchers were put off by Lukačić’s fairly uninviting curriculum vitae, which on the whole unfolded within the confines of the Franciscan community. Another thing that might have proved discouraging was that the only preserved collection of the motets, identified by Dragan Plamenac in Berlin in the mid-1930s, was considered irretrievably lost for half a century after the war. The first three chapters in the book are dedicated to Lukačić’s life and work, while the last chapter provides an insight into research into older Croatian music initiated in the mid-1930s by Plamenac, a Croatian-American musicologist with a worldwide reputation and also follows the vicissitudes of the only extant printed copy of the Sacrae cantiones. At the end of the book, in the context of the polyphony of recent investigations, I mention my own modest part in this, in which I have been unable to avoid a first person narrative. Today, when I recall 1983, when as a student of the Music Academy in Zagreb, I had the good fortune first of all to find the lost copy of Sacrae cantiones in Krakow, and then very soon after had the chance to publish in Padua the first complete critical edition, I am happy to mention many who then put me in their debt: the staff of the Jagiellońian Library who allowed me to inspect the original of the Lukačić collection; Fra Ludovico Bertazzo, the editor of the Padua edition; the clergy of the Monastery of St Francis on the waterfront, Split, from the Franciscan monastery at Sv. Duh in Zagreb and from the St Jerome Institute in Rome, who several times allowed me to study their archival fonds; to friends from Šibenik – Davor Šarić, Krešimir Mrčela, Rudolf Vučić, Milivoj Zenić, Vilijam Lakić – who helped me during the last few years in many campaigns related to Lukačić, and in the production of the DVD enclosed with this book.“ (Ennio Stipčević)