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Artist
Kasper Sielicki
1+ albums
16th centurypolish
about
Kasper Sielicki (Caspar Polach / Caspar Polonus) (c. 1570? – after July 1591) Kasper Sielicki was a Polish lutenist-composer active at the end of the sixteenth century whose career is known chiefly from court-account evidence and from the survival of his music in German-tablature sources. Modern Polish reference work summarises him as probably entering royal service around the mid-1580s—possibly first as a page connected to the court of Stefan Batory or Anna Jagiellon—where he would have learned the lute, plausibly in an environment influenced by Wojciech Długoraj. He is then documented in royal accounts as being employed as a lutenist to King Sigismund III Vasa between 30 March 1588 and 27 July 1591. His surviving oeuvre is entirely for lute and survives under several name-forms and abbreviations (“Caspar Polach/Polonus”, “C.S.”), including a substantial fantasia, passamezzo and galliards, and an intabulation of Ach hertziges herz. The principal witnesses include the Donaueschingen lute manuscripts (Fürstenberg collection), the Basel “Wurstisen Lute Book” (CH-Bu Ms. F.IX.70), the Łódź university manuscript M 6983 (formerly Berlin-Grässe 5102), and two galliards added to a copy of Besard’s Thesaurus harmonicus held in Genoa—evidence that Sielicki’s music circulated beyond Poland within the wider Central European lute network at the century’s end. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.