Johann Kaspar Kerll

Among the many German organist/composers celebrated in his day time but little recognized to contemporary listeners, Johann Kaspar Kerll continued the keyboard customs of Frescobaldi and Froberger, and was a composer central to the first many years of the Munich opera home. His chapel music was also respectable. Scholars possess exerted some energy wanting to disprove several claims designed for Kerll; he didn’t, apparently, research with Frescobaldi, although he might have had connection with Froberger. Furthermore, there is no evidence to aid the assertion that Kerll offered as organist in the Stephansdom, a respected chapel in Vienna. What’s certain is usually that Kerll got his 1st lessons from his organist dad, and was composing music by enough time he was 14. Even more formal studies arrived in Vienna in the 1640s under Giovanni Valentini, and in Rome in the past due 1640s and early 1650s with Carissimi. By age group 20, Kerll was proficient plenty of to land employment as organist in the Brussels courtroom of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who subsidized his lessons with Carissimi. Right now thoroughly trained rather than simply talented, Kerll acquired the vice-Kapellmeister post in the courtroom of Elector Ferdinand Maria in Munich in 1656; he increased to complete Kapellmeister in half a year, upon the loss of life of his forerunner. The following 12 months it had been Kerll who published the 1st function, Oronte, performed at the brand new Munich opera home. This and Kerll’s 10 additional operas possess all been dropped. The entire year 1658 brought another exclusive task: the mass for the coronation of Emperor Leopold I at Frankfurt. The emperor raised the peasant-born Kerll towards the nobility in 1664. Kerll’s profession, however, had not been one lengthy, easy ascent. He fought using the Italian performers in the Munich courtroom, and in 1673 he give up his work and shifted to Vienna. How he primarily supported himself there is certainly unclear, but Leopold do offer him a pension in 1675 and produced him one of is own courtroom organists 2 yrs afterwards. Kerll survived both plague of 1679 as well as the siege of Vienna in 1683, commemorating them both in music, and came back to Munich for approximately the last 10 years of his lifestyle, publishing there a few of his body organ and sacred music. Kerll is certainly praised perhaps much less for his very own characteristics than for his capacity being a successor to Froberger and forerunner of Bach, especially in the region of body organ counterpoint. The majority of his masses make use of the then-fashionable concertante technique.