Nonet

The musical works of Josip, or Josef, Mandić (1883 – 1959) are a paradigm of the phenomenon of oblivion so common in art history. For how else can one account for Mandić and his opuses being to the widest circle of music lovers – and to most people who are at all familiar with Croatian music – today totally unknown, although in the words of competent critics of the time his First Symphony “was the first modern large-scale symphony by a composer in this country” (L. Šafranek-Kavić) , or “the greatest and grandest instrumental work of our [Yugoslav] music to date” (Emil Adamič) ? Mandić’s orchestral compositions were conducted by some of the leading conductors of his time, like Nikolai Malko, Georg Szell (György Széll), Fritz Busch and Václav Talich, with such orchestras as the Czech Philharmonic, the Dresden Staatskapelle, or, for example, the Royal Scottish Philharmonic! The simplest answer is that most of Mandić’s works just disappeared without trace after his death in Prague in 1959.... The Nonet was composed for a top Prague ensemble – The Czech Nonet, which, at the time, was one of the best Prague and Czech chamber ensembles, which performed it in Prague, as well as Tallinn and Rome. The Nonet was also a composition from the part of Mandić's oeuvre that had clear tendencies for change in the musical-aesthetic and composition-technique paradigms – a definite return to composing in functional tonality. The construction of the form and the motifs in the Nonet are significantly different from his previous works: Mandić abandoned the principles of baroque theme imitation through voices and leaned towards the repetition technique, i.e. addition of short formal parts, blending them, primarily through sequencing, but also through simple ordering – a technique comparable to film editing... (Davor Merkaš)