Constantin Christian Dedekind

Constantin Christian Dedekind (Reinsdorf, Anhalt-Köthen, 1628 – Dresden, 1715) was a German poet and composer, whose name is above all linked to the musical life of the electoral court at Dresden during the second half of the seventeenth century. A grandson of Henning Dedekind, he received his early training at the celebrated abbey of Quedlinburg, where his teacher was the abbess Anna Sophia, Landgravine of Hesse. This influence awakened in him, already at the age of thirteen, a passion for writing verse.

Five years later he moved to Dresden to study with Christoph Bernhard. In 1654 he entered the Dresden Hofkantorei as a bass singer, a post he still held in 1663, the year in which he had married a sister of Bernhard's wife, Maria Dorothea Weber. In 1666, two years after Bernhard had left for Hamburg, he was appointed director of the Hofkapelle. Dresden then brought together many outstanding violinists, and the prominence of string music at the court is attributed in part to his influence. However, in 1675 he resigned in the face of growing hostility from other musicians, as the court was divided between Italian and German instrumentalists struggling to assert themselves. His fortune, accumulated as a tax collector in Meissen and in the Erzgebirge, allowed him to live without a musical post. He attempted to devote himself to music publishing, without success.

His poetic activity did not decline during those years. Under the pseudonym «Con Cor D» he was elected a member of the prestigious poetic academy Elbschwanenorden. In the last four decades of his life he composed very little and devoted his energies almost entirely to poetry.

His most important work is the large collection Aelbianische Musen-Lust (1657), containing 146 solo songs, sacred and secular, with basso continuo, set to texts by the leading lyric poets of the age, among them Dach, Finckelthaus, Fleming, Rist and Dedekind himself. Most are strophic, with syllabic declamation. The rest of his music shows a much greater Italian influence; following Adam Krieger, he inserted instrumental ritornellos between verses. His Musicalischer Jahrgang gathers 120 sacred «concertos» for two voices and bass, with recitatives, arioso and da capo arias, which places them among the examples of the German sacred cantata. He also wrote dance music and an abundant literary output, including song texts, Bible translations, lyric and satirical poetry, and plays and oratorio libretti.