Musical watercourses: German vocal music before and including Johann Sebastian Bach

Abstract

There is a pleasant poetic analogy worth borrowing in Vox Luminis’s liner notes by Jérôme Lejeune: ‘Bach is the German word for stream: the Bach family is a fine representation of its name, for the family developed in the same way that a brook develops into a major watercourse; the earlier members of the Bach family were the brooks, rivulets and streams that came together and formed the mighty river that was Johann Sebastian Bach’. This review considers a batch of recordings which trace that musical watercourse not only from the Bach dynasty but also includes Vivaldi and two relatively unknown tributaries, Rupert Ignaz Mayr and Samuel Friedrich Capricornus. Mayr’s music, heard on Rupert Ignaz Mayr: Psalms from Sacri Concentus 1681 (Challenge Classics cc72759, issued 2018, 59′)—containing five world premiere recordings by the composer—will be an exciting discovery for lovers of early music. Ars Antigua Austria director and violinist Gunar Letzbor gives a comprehensive background on this little-known composer. Meyr (1646–1712) served as a Kapellmeister, composer and violinist to prince-bishop Johann Franz Eckher von Kapfing und Liechteneck at the court in Freising around the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. Intriguingly, he is remembered not only for his sacred music and violin sonatas but also for his music for school plays. The Freising music collection comprises many works of composers from Munich: Pez, Kerll and Bernabei, and a great number of Meyr’s works—most of which are sadly now lost.