Christian Gottlob Neefe

Christian Gottlob Neefe(b Chemnitz, 5 Feb 1748; d Dessau, 26 Jan 1798): German composer. He received his initial musical education from Wilhelmi, city organist of Chemnitz, and C.G.

Tag, Kantor of Hohenstein. He was composing at the age of 12, and partly educated himself from the textbooks of Marpurg and C.P.E. Bach. From 1769 to 1771 he studied law at Leipzig University, and then continued his musical training under J.A. Hiller, whom he replaced as music director of Seyler's theatre troupe in 1776. He joined the Grossmann-Hellmut troupe in 1779 and moved to Bonn, where, perhaps as early as 1780, he began teaching the young Beethoven the piano, organ, thoroughbass and composition, acquainting him also with Bach's Das wohltemperirte Clavier and C.P.E. Bach's Gellert-Lieder. From 1782 he served as court organist (Beethoven occasionally deputized for him in this post); he also substituted for Lucchesi as court Kapellmeister during the latter's Italian journey of 1783–4. With the death of the Elector Max Friedrich in 1784 Neefe's financial situation deteriorated considerably. The Grossmann theatre was closed and his salary as organist reduced, and he was forced to depend on an income from private teaching. Shortly before the French invasion in 1794 the court disbanded, leaving Neefe unemployed; the occupying French forces allowed him only a minor official post. He became music director of the Dessau theatre at the end of 1796, but fell seriously ill and died soon afterwards.

Neefe was important both as a composer of lieder and Singspielen and as a teacher. While a student he became acquainted with Hiller's efforts at a comprehensive music pedagogy, which later influenced his teaching at Bonn. Hiller also stimulated Neefe's interest in music theatre, and as early as 1771 commissioned him to compose ten songs for Der Dorfbalbier. In these, as in his later work, Neefe showed a particular gift for writing in smaller forms. His theatrical works (the most popular being Adelheit von Veltheim, based on Turkish exoticisms similar to those in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail of two years later) reveal attractive melodic writing and character realization. For dramatic climaxes he occasionally made use of melodrama, as previously developed by Benda, and he composed a full monodrama Sophonisbe on Benda's models. To help disseminate Mozart's operas he prepared vocal scores of five of these works for the publisher Simrock.

Neefe's lieder show an unmistakable inclination towards dramatic effects, especially in the Serenaten of 1777, whose texts are probably his own. These works show great variety of form, and turn away from the folk style of the Berlin school towards cantata-like ballades. The Klopstock odes similarly reflect Neefe's efforts to create novel forms, and his prefaces to the three editions of them (1776–c1785) touch on the then progressive issues of the relation of words to music and the singer's understanding of the text. The elaborately varied strophic songs of Neefe's later years foreshadow the lieder of the Romantic period, above all those of Schubert.