- Simon Sechter
Simon Sechter (
October 11 ,1788 –September 10 ,1867 ) was aAustria n music theorist,teacher , organist, conductor andcomposer .Sechter was born in Friedberg (Frymburk),
Bohemia , then part of theAustrian Empire , and moved toVienna in 1804, succeedingJan Vořišek as court organist there in 1824. In 1810 he began teachingpiano and voice at an academy for blind students. In 1828 the ailingFranz Schubert had one counterpoint lesson with him. In 1851 Sechter was appointed professor of composition at the Vienna Conservatory. In his last years, Sechter was generous to a fault, and died in poverty. He was succeeded at the Conservatory byAnton Bruckner , a former student whose teaching methods were based on Sechter's.Others whom Sechter taught include the composer
Henri Vieuxtemps , the conductorFranz Lachner , the teacherEduard Marxsen (who taughtJohannes Brahms piano and counterpoint), the composer and teacherJohann Nepomuk Fuchs ,Gustav Nottebohm ,Carl Umlauf , and the pianist-composersSigismond Thalberg andAdolf von Henselt , to list a few.Sechter had strict teaching methods. For instance, he forbade Bruckner to write any original compositions while studying counterpoint with him. The scholar Robert Simpson believes that "Sechter unknowingly brought about Bruckner's originality by insisting that it be suppressed until it could no longer be contained." Sechter taught Bruckner by mail from 1855 to 1861 and considered Bruckner his most dedicated pupil. Upon Bruckner's graduation, Sechter wrote a
fugue dedicated to his student.In the three-volume treatise on the principles of composition, "Die Grundsätze der musikalischen Komposition", Sechter wrote a seminal work that influenced many later theorists. Sechter's ideas are derived from
Jean-Philippe Rameau 's theories of the fundamental bass, always diatonic even when the surface is highly chromatic. Sechter was an advocate ofjust intonation over well-tempered tuning.Carl C. Müller compiled and adapted Sechter's "Die richtige Folge der Grundharmonien" as "The Correct Order of Fundamental Harmonies: A Treatise on Fundamental Basses, and their Inversions and Substitutes" (Wm. A. Pond, 1871; G. Schirmer, 1898).
Sechter was also a composer, and in that capacity is mostly remembered for writing about 5,000 fugues (he tried to write at least one fugue every day), but he also wrote masses and oratorios. In addition he wrote five
operas "Das Testament des Magiers" (1842), "Ezzeline, die unglückliche Gegangene aus Deli-Katesse" (1843), "Ali Hitsch-Hatsch" (1844), "Melusine" (1851), and "Des Müllers Ring" (?). [ [http://opera.stanford.edu/composers/S.html Opera Glass] ] He may have been the most prolific composer who ever lived, outdoing evenGeorg Philipp Telemann in the quantity of his output.References
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