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Vatroslav Lisinski
Vatroslav Lisinski (1810 – 1854) was one of the “greatest of Illyrian musical artists”…
Biography
Franjo Ksaver Kuhač, music historian and “father of Croatian musicology” would not put Vatroslav Lisinski into his book Ilirski glazbenici / Illyrian Musicians. He did not wish to devote just a mere single chapter to this “greatest of our Illyrian musical artists”, as he had done with eighteen other Illyrian musicians and their biographies, rather dedicated to him a whole booklet. Although this writer had experienced “a little section of our musical history” in company with many of the “dedicated musicians” of the Illyrian movement, he was divided from Lisinski by both time and space. For while in 1854 Lisinski was lying on his bier in Zagreb, Kuhač, then a twenty-year-old, was completing his teacher training in Pest, and was not even aware of the existence and activity of the Illyrian musicians in whose footsteps he was to continue his work, making them familiar to his contemporaries.
We can discover the first attempts to establish a national language and culture in Zagreb and the founding moments of such endeavours in the second decade of the 19th century, while the creation of a middle class and its culture was still in swaddling bands. Bishop Vrhovac had endeavoured on the basis of Enlightenment ideas to encourage the collection of the national heritage (1813), Juraj Matija Šporer had intended in 1818 in Vienna to launch a paper in Croatian (Oglasnik ilirski) while at the same time Zagreb was not only inscribed on the map of international guest appearances but was able to furnish appropriate hospitality for travelling musicians in its aristocratic theatre and in its converted concert space. Not only were there the travelling German and later Italian and Hungarian itinerant theatrical and operatic troupes, but the Croatian language too gradually made its way into the music scene, first of all from the mouths of foreign musicians, and rapidly thereafter from local artists. It was in these circumstances that the first steps in music were taken by Vatroslav (Ignatius) Fux (Fuchs) (born in Zagreb, and christened on July 8, 1819), better known as Lisinski [deriving from a root meaning fox] and officially so named from 1850.
He spent his childhood and youth in the parental home on a little estate on the southern side of Ilica (today the site is occupied by house number 37). He went to elementary and high school in Gradec, together with future poet Ivan Trnski, the singer Albert Ognjan Štriga, secretary of the Croatian Music Institute Ivan Vardian and others. However, unlike his fellows, he did not acquire his musical training in 1829 with the opening of the music school of the Croatian Music Institute, itself founded two years earlier, but privately. Piano lessons (which then could not be had in the institute’s school) were meant to prepare him for the career of teacher and organist. There is little information about this period, and it is assumed that his teachers were the pianist and organist Juraj Sojka (a Czech), and then the excellently trained composer Juraj Karlo Wisner-Morgenstern (a German from Arad), from whom he learned music theory. At the same time he studied philosophy, subsequently law, and in 1842 began the obligatory unpaid training period as a notary. At that time he might have attended concert performances, usually organised either in one of the churches or in the hall of the Academy (in today’s Katarinin trg) or theatrical performances in the newly-opened public civic theatre, the Stanković, as it was called, on Markov trg, regularly covered by the German and the Croatian papers (Agramer Zeitung with its supplement Luna and Novine horvatzke and its supplement Danica, later Narodne novine and others). During the 1830s, companies of more or less successful impresarios filed through Zagreb, the most prominent being those of Carl Mayer and the Bornstein brothers. The audience was happy to see performances of Rossini’s operas Die Italienerin in Algier, Tancred, Der Barbier von Sevilla, Aschenbrödel, Diebische Elster, Die Frau am See, Boieldieu’s Die weisse Frau, Mozart’s Don Juan and Die Zauberflöte, Weber’s Freischütz (9. 1.), Auber’s Die Stumme aus Portici and the particularly popular Der Maurer und der Schosser, and at the end of the 1830s Bellini’s Montechi und Capuletti, Norma and Das Castell von Urbino, Hérold’s opera Zampa, Auber’s Die Ballnacht, Donizetti’s Gemma di Vergy, Elisir d’amore, Torquato Tasso. They applauded especially engaged vocal artists such as Maria Ehnes of Vienna and Mme Frisch from Odessa. An orchestra composed of musicians from the Zagreb infantry regiments, teachers at the Musikverein and the more skilled amateurs played under the baton of foreign and local conductors. However, the 1840s brought public dissatisfaction with weaker performances and an uninteresting repertoire. In the 1830s Germany singers were performing singspiel in Croatian translations or inserting “folk” songs in the German works of Bauerle and Muller or Schweigert. Heinrich Bornstein himself published in 1839 a proclamation proposing the foundation of an “Illyrian national theatre” and the introduction of the national language in the theatre, along the lines of the Czech and Hungarian. For the first performance, he proposed Kukuljević’s heroic play Juran and Sophia or the Turks at Sksak (with music by Livadić and Weisz), which two years earlier had been twice performed in Sisak at the Royal Hungarian Aristocratic Bodyguard by an amateur ensemble. In fact, Lisinski could have seen this very performance in 1841, the patriotic theatre company performing it in the yard of his birth house.
Selected authors