Biamonti 624 – Prosody Study on a Text by Homer, 1815
The musical examples, analyses, and texts on this page are by Graziano Denini.
Biamonti 624 – Prosody Study on a Text by Homer, 1815 Page 48 (Nottebohm, Volume II, page 328). It bears the indication: “Hexameter”. Text: “Wär es ein anderer nun dem wir Danaer ehrten mit Wettkamp(f)”
Note by Graziano Denini: In reality, it is found on page 49 of the manuscript, lines 1 and 2, occupying only the right half of the staves, while the left half is left blank. The text is taken from Book 23 of Homer’s Iliad, line 274:
“Atreus Sohn, und ihr andern, ihr hellumschienten Achaier, Für die reisigen stehn die kampfpreis’ hier in dem Kreife. Wär es ein anderer nun, den wir Danaer ehrten mit Wettkampf;”
(“Son of Atreus, and you others, you bright-armored Achaeans, For the warriors the prizes of combat stand here in the circle. Were it another now, whom we Danaans honored with competition;”). This is a prosodic study, likely inspired by the German translation of Homer by Johann Heinrich Voss, a poet, philologist, and Enlightenment figure whose works Beethoven read and kept in his personal library.
Johann Heinrich Voss, poet, philologist, translator, polemicist, and Enlightenment democrat, was born in 1751 in Sommerstorf (Mecklenburg), descending from those who were once considered serfs. He spent his youth in Penzlin. Though his family was relatively well-off, they fell into poverty after the Seven Years’ War.
From 1766 to 1769, he attended the Latin school in Neubrandenburg, and was then hired as a legal clerk under humiliating conditions by a local nobleman. In 1772, thanks to his patron Heinrich Christian Boie—editor in Göttingen and brother of Voss’s future wife—he began studying philology at the University of Göttingen.
Voss joined the intellectual circle around the Musenalmanach. Alongside fellow poets like Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty, Count Leopold, and Christian Stolberg, he co-founded the Göttinger Hain literary group.
In 1775, he took over the editorial direction of the Musenalmanach and moved to Wandsbek, where he began translating Homer’s Odyssey, completing it four years later.
In 1778, he became rector of the Latin school in Otterndorf, and in 1782, of the Latin school in Eutin. Letters attest to his friendships with Klopstock, Gleim, Goethe, Schiller, Claudius, and Wilhelm von Humboldt—all poets Beethoven read, whose volumes were found in the composer’s personal library.
In 1802, Voss moved to Jena for three years, and in 1805, he was appointed rector at the University of Heidelberg. This phase of his life was marked by intense translation work and by his opposition to Romanticism, obscurantism, and post–French Revolution reactionary forces.
He died of a stroke in 1826.
His poems were often set to music by composers such as C.P.E. Bach, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, Felix Mendelssohn, Carl Maria von Weber, and Johannes Brahms. Many of his poems and musical settings were published in the Musenalmanach. Voss was a renowned translator. His most famous works include: Homer: Iliad and Odyssey (first published in 1793, reissued multiple times during Beethoven’s lifetime: 1806, 1808, 1814, etc.). Shakespeare: 9-volume translation (1818–1829), completed with his son Heinrich. Aristophanes, Hesiod (1806), Theocritus, Bion of Smyrna, Moschus (1808). Virgil (1799, revised 1821), Horace (1806), Tibullus (1810), Propertius (1830), Ovid (1798). His Homer translations remain foundational to modern German understanding of the ancient epics.
