Kornelije Stanković

Kornelije Stanković (Serbian Cyrillic: Корнелије Станковић, pronounced [kɔ̌rnɛːlijɛ stǎːŋkɔʋit͡ɕ]) (11/23 August 1831 in Buda – 4/16 April 1865) was Serbian composer, melographer, conductor, pianist and musical writer. He is notable for his four volumes of harmonized Serbian melodies, which were published in Vienna between 1858 and 1863 and are one of the most important foundations for later Serbian music.

He was born in a bourgeois Serbian family in Tabán, a part of Buda inhabited mostly by Serbs. After the death of his parents he lived with his elder sister in Аrad, where he went to primary school and attended two years of gymnasium. Later he moved to Szeged and returned to his brother’s house in Taban, in order to finish school in Pest (1849). By a generous favour of family friends, Jelena and Pavle Riđički von Skribešće, in the year 1850 his musical education started at the Conservatory in Vienna. He studied harmony and counterpoint, as well as the basic piano lessons, with a court composer and prominent organist Simon Sechter, also the professor of Anton Bruckner. Fertile musical life in Vienna and instructions from Sechter marked the most significant, but also the only part of Stanković’s schooling. He was not able to go for musical specialization to Russia with his incurable disease, tuberculosis. He died early, in his thirty-fourth, on 4/16 April 1865 in Buda. He was buried in the Serbian cemetery in Taban. After moving this cemetery, his funeral remains were conveyed to the cemetery in Buda. In 1940, Musical society “Stanković“ initiated their moving to the Alley of the Greats in Novo groblje in Belgrade.

The years of Stanković’s life and work were imbued by numerous political events. Among them were the revolution 1848, absolutistic period of von Bach’s reign and Crimean War, the breakdown of Bach’s regime and the abolition of the Voivodeship of Serbia. In Serbia this was the period of the second reign of the Serbian Prince Mihailo Obrenović. The national movement among the Serbs was established by the work on language and folk literature done by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Although himself not a singer, Vuk accepted the view of Jacob Grimm that lyrical folk poems should be supplemented with their music settings.

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