(Lat.; Ger. Nänie).
Funeral song in ancient Rome in praise of a dead person, analogous to the Greek Thrēnos (threnody). It was generally sung by praeficae (professional female mourners) or by female relatives of the dead person, to the accompaniment of one or more tibiae, or to the lyra; the tuba and cornu were also used for funeral music, often as purely instrumental music. The praeficae with their assistants probably sang the nenia in the manner of a litany; it may have consisted of traditional formulae. Others present might also have taken up the song. The nenia was intended to banish the maleficent influence of the spirits of the underworld; in this sense it is said to survive today in remote parts of Italy. The term was also used in antiquity for the ending of a song or poem.
The word ‘nenia’ was revived in a humanistic spirit by Erasmus in his Naenia in Johannes Ockeghem musicorum principem (set to music by Johannes Lupi), and later in a more general sense, that is, not in commemoration of an individual, in the Nänie by Schiller (set by Goetz, 1874; Brahms, op.82, 1880–81; and Orff, 1956). The term ‘exequiae’ was used in the title of the Musicalische Exequien (Dresden, 1636) by Schütz; this is a setting of various German texts used in funeral rites, to commemorate Heinrich von Reuss.
J. Quasten: Musik und Gesang in den Kulten der heidnischen Antike und christlichen Frühzeit (Münster, 1930, 2/1973; Eng. trans., 1983), 195–6, 221
G. Fleischhauer: Etrurien und Rom, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii/5 (Leipzig, 1964), 52ff
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 65ff
GEOFFREY CHEW/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN