de Jong, Marinus

Marinus de Jong
(Oosterhout, 14 August 1891 – Ekeren, 13 June 1984)

Elegy, opus 192
(1982)
for flute and harp (or violin and piano)

Marinus de Jong was born in Oosterhout, The Netherlands, but he would spend most of his life in Flanders. At fifteen he was admitted to the Royal Flemish Conservatoire of Antwerp, where three years later he won first prize for fugue (with Lodewijk Mortelmans) and piano (with Emile Bosquet). In the meantime, he played the viola in different orchestras in Antwerp. He worked so hard that he became overfatigued. When the First World War broke out, he returned to the neutral Netherlands, looking for peace and quiet in the Benedictine abbey of Oosterhout. There he trained as an organist and studied Gregorian, which would become one of his main sources of inspiration. In 1915 he published his opus 1, a simple two-part Missa Ave Maria. After the Armistice, he returned to Antwerp, where he won the composing competition of Albert De Vleeshouwer in 1919 at the Conservatoire, with the organ piece Prelude en tripelfuga, op. 2 (1917). After the war, he integrated completely in the Belgian music scene. He married the Flemish pianist Johanna Corthals and in 1926 he became a Belgian citizen.
Initially, he mostly manifested himself as a piano virtuoso. In the early 1920s, he went on tours throughout America and

Germany, but eventually he dedicated himself more and more to composing and teaching. In 1926, he succeeded Mortelmans as a teacher of counterpoint and fugue at the Lemmensinstituut in Malines, a position he would hold until 1963. At the Antwerp Conservatoire, he became a piano teacher in 1932 and in 1948 he also began teaching counterpoint and fugue. He wrote two didactic works: the six-part Theoretische en praktische harmonieleer (Theoretical and practical harmony) and the five-part Het contrapunt (The counterpoint), which remained unpublished.

Read full preface and also Flemish preface > HERE