Wanning, Johannes (EN)

Wanning, Wanningus Campensis, Johannes, Hans Wannigk, Wangnick, Wannicke, Wanningk *1537 Kampen (the Netherlands), buried 23 October 1603 Gdańsk, Dutch composer. Nothing is known about his early years. From 1560 to 1567, he was an alto in the chapel of Prince Albert of Hohenzollern in Königsberg, and in 1564 and 1566 he composed some works that ended up in the ducal library. In 1561, he enrolled at the local university. In 1568 or 1569, he became Kapellmeister of the St. Mary’s Church in Gdańsk. He owed this position – according to his own words – to Gdańsk councillors Constantin Ferber and Johannes Brandes. Concerned about the high standard of the ensemble, he opposed the plans of his superiors, who demanded the replacement of professional sopranos with boys from St. Mary’s School. As Kapellmeister, he was obliged to teach music there, but his reluctance to do so meant that after 1580, a separate singing teacher was employed, whom Wanning, however, had to pay himself. In 1574, he became a member of the elite Gdańsk Brotherhood of St. Reinold, where his colleague was Georg Knoffius, a collector of musical prints. In 1599, the musician fell seriously ill, and N. Zangius took over as bandmaster. Wanning was buried in the chancel of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His widow received a pension from the city treasury until the end of her life in 1618.

Wanning dedicated his motet collections to the councillors of Gdańsk (1580, 1589) and Malbork (1584). In the former, he used diverse texts, mostly Old Testament, including seven from the Song of Songs. This edition likely contains works written over several years. The motet A domino egressa est res ista, modelled on a similar piece by F. de Rivulo, may have been written as a musical accompaniment to P. Praetorius’s play Comoedia aus der Biblischen Historia von Isaacs und Rebecca Hochzeit (Gdańsk 1579). The next two motet collections are cycles – Wanning was the first Protestant composer to set Gospel texts to music for the entire church year (for Sundays in 1584 and for major holidays in 1590). Some works – particularly those from the latest edition – are based not on Gospel pericopes, but on their paraphrases or other texts (e.g., antiphons or responsories) associated with a given holiday. Wanning’s masses are missa parodia; the Missa Vestiva i colli is based on a madrigal by Palestrina, and the Missa Dormiend ung iour uses sound material from Ph. Verdelot’s madrigal Dormiendo un giorno and the chanson by O. di Lasso Susanne un jour. Wanning pioneered the composition of wedding pieces in Royal Prussia. In his work, he drew on the Dutch tradition, among other things, through the use of dense polyphonic textures, intense imitations, sometimes even overimitation, and occasionally the ostinato technique and additional, commentary texts in the tenors of motets. He did not shy away from musical rhetoric, sometimes employing numerical symbolism.

Literature: P. Simon Geschichte der Stadt Danzig, vol. 2, Gdańsk 1918; H.J. Moser Die mehrstimmige Vertonung des Evangeliums, Leipzig 1931, Wiesbaden 2^nd ed. 1968; H. Rauschning Geschichte der Musik und Musikpflege in Danzig, Gdańsk 1931; M. Federmann Musik und Musikpflege zur Zeit Herzog Albrechts. Zur Geschichte der Königsberger Hofkapelle in den Jahren 1525–1578, Kassel 1932; W. Krebs Die lateinische Evangelien-Motette, Tutzing 1995; A. Leszczyńska Johannes Wanning – kapelmistrz kościoła Mariackiego w Gdańsku, “Muzyka” 1999 No. 3; A. Leszczyńska „Sententiae insigniores ex evangeliis dominicalibus excerptae” (1584) by Johannes Wanning, in: Musica Baltica. Danzig und die Musikkultur Europas, ed. D. Popinigis, Gdańsk 2000; A. Leszczyńska Evangelical Pericopes in Johannes Wanning’s Interpretation of 1590, Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis. Acta Musicologica XII, Bydgoszcz 2003; A. Leszczyńska The Motets of Johannes Wanning from the Collection „Sacrae Cantiones” 1580, “Musica Iagellonica” III, 2004; A. Leszczyńska Technika parodii w twórczości renesansowych kompozytorów kręgu gdańskiego, “Polski Rocznik Muzykologiczny” IV, 2005; A. Leszczyńska Stockholm manuscript S 230 and its Prussian context, in: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 11: Source Studies in Musical Culture, ed. A. Mądry, M. Walter-Mazur, Poznań 2012; A. Leszczyńska The first three decades of occasional music in Royal Prussia, in: Gelegenheitsmusik im Ostseeraum vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert, ed. P. Tenhaef, Berlin 2015.