Musical Mysteries and Blessings Works by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Mark Andre
Har r y Haskell
“Of all the violin players of the last century,” the English music historian Charles Burney wrote in 1789, “Biber seems to have been the best, and his solos are the most difficult and most fanciful of any music I have seen of the same period.” Although Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber composed numerous operas, masses, cantatas, and other large-scale works, his posthumous reputation rests largely on his technically demanding and stylistically innovative music for solo violin, as well as a diverse body of instrumental chamber music. Bohemian by birth, Biber spent his entire life within the sprawling, polyglot empire of the Austrian Habsburgs, which offered abundant opportunities for both musical growth and professional advancement. An entry-level job as a rank-and-file musician in the minor principality of Graz paved the way to a more prestigious appointment in the musical household of the Bishop of Olmütz, Karl Liechtenstein, in the central Moravian town of Kroměříž. There Biber gained access to a large and well-funded cadre of performers, including 38 highly trained instrumentalists who displayed their talents in the lavishly scored and often brilliantly virtuosic music that the bishop commissioned for his court and chapel. Although Biber’s prowess on the violin made him a local celebrity in Kroměříž, the young virtuoso had loftier ambitions, and in 1670 he departed for the comparative metropolis of Salzburg, where he would remain until his death in 1704. The ecclesiastical court of Prince-Archbishop Max Gandolph von Kuenburg was an outpost of Italian culture, expressed in architecture as well as music. It was
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