Johannes Eccard

Perhaps one of the most important Lutheran composers from the sixteenth hundred years, Johannes Eccard helped foster a fresh musical tradition that was centered across the Lutheran chorale — a tradition that could eventually culminate in the music of Bach as well as later on, Brahms. Eccard was created in the Thuringian town of Mühlhausen, and started his lengthy musical profession in the Lateinschule there. He most likely was a pupil from the Mühlhausen Kantor Joachim a Burck, and continuing his musical education in Weimar beneath the tutelage from the kapellmeister David Köller (1569-1571). For another 2 yrs, Eccard sang in the Hofkapelle from the Bavarian courtroom, and certainly went there to review music and musical structure using the world-renowned Orlande de Lassus who led the choir. Having assimilated the very best music of his Protestant (and Catholic) instructors, Eccard embarked upon a stellar musical profession, beginning in his mid-twenties (1577-1578) with work in family members from the greatly rich Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger, for whom Eccard composed a Mass, and with whose support he published his second reserve of German-texted music. Eccard proceeded from Fugger’s patronage to some high courtroom appointments over the German countryside. He offered in the chapel from the Margrave of Bandenburg at Ansbach and Königsberg from 1580; he was marketed to vice kapellmeister in 1586 and lastly achieved the sought after name of chapelmaster when his next patron, the Elector Jocahim Friedrich of Brandenburg, became Administrator of Prussia. By this time in 1604, Eccard acquired continuing not only to create the seasonal circular of cathedral music, but acquired printed an enormous and influential assortment of Lutheran chorale configurations, the Geistliche Lieder of 1597. In 1608, the Elector place Eccard responsible for his primary musical pushes in Berlin, where in fact the previous musician expired in 1611. However Eccard’s music didn’t cease along with his loss of life. It had been still being published in brand-new editions as past due as 1644, had been quoted as past due as 1672 (within a Interest setting up by Johann Sebastiani), and will be valued by German music artists as past due as Johannes Brahms. Eccard pioneered and created not merely the well-known basic four-part congregational configurations from the Lutheran hymns (his placing of Luther’s “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” became a typical), but also the more complex kind of Lutheran chorale-motet that could become so well-known in the seventeenth hundred years.