Abstract
Joannes Tollius was a singer and composer, born in Amersfoort around 1555. Already at an early age he was appointed music director of the chapel of Our Lady in his native town. In 1579 the city joined the Dutch Revolt. At that moment the chapel was assigned to the Protestants
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and thus Tollius lost his job. Not long afterwards he left for Italy. In Italy Tollius worked subsequently in Rieti (1583-1584) and Assisi (1584-1586), in both instances as choirmaster of the cathedral; next in Rome (1586-1588) and Padua (1588-1601), as a member of the choir (tenor). At the end of 1601 Tollius went to Copenhagen, where he was appointed as an exceptionally highly paid singer to the court of King Christian IV. He was dismissed early in 1603. Then we lose track of him for a while. From 1607 he reappears in the archives of Amersfoort, in which city, however, he was probably not a resident. Presumably he lived in or near Copenhagen. He was quite wealthy. He died sometime between 20 October 1619 and 13 April 1620. The biography of Tollius highlights the fact that after 1580 the northern Netherlands provided no longer work with an adequate salary for singers. The traditional system of music education in Europe was based on Catholic religious institutions. In the Low Countries the cooperation of the Latin Schools with the local church choirs created a perfect educational system in which young musical talent could develop. These institutions were brusquely abolished in the northern Netherlands as a result of the Reformation. Alongside the economic decline of the southern Low Countries that resulted from the migration of wealthy merchants from Flanders and Brabant to cities in Holland such as Leiden, Haarlem and Amsterdam, this institutional change unwittingly brought an end to the leading role of singers from the Low Countries in musical life across Europe, making Tollius one of the last representatives of a breed on its way to extinction. The works of Tollius still known to us were published between 1590 and 1598. Three-quarters of these works are motets and for the rest madrigals. In addition a three-part Dutch Christmas song is included in one of the motet editions. Tollius’s music is broadly similar to that of his contemporaries. In his works he sometimes reflects the style of the previous generation (e.g. with canon techniques or long passages of parallel sixth cords), but at other times – and not only in the madrigals – he experimented with hitherto unusual twists. Although most of his music was composed in Italy, Joannes Tollius’s Amersfoort origins make him a Dutch musician. He has left behind an admittedly small, but certainly interesting oeuvre which well deserves the attention of both musicians and music lovers.
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