HOMILIUS, Gottfried August (1714-1785) - Concerto per il Cembalo (c.1761)

Gottfried August Homilius (1714-1785) - Concerto per il Cembalo concertato (c.1761)
Performers: Sibelius + Instruments samples (edited by Pau NG)
Painting: Bernardo Bellotto (1721-1780) - Der Neustädter Markt in Dresden (1749-1750)
Further info: Gottfried August Homilius (1714-1785)

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Gottfried August Homilius
(Rosenthal, 2 February 1714 - Dresden, 2 June 1785)

German composer, organist and Kantor. The son of a Lutheran pastor, he spent his childhood from 1714 in Porschendorf (Pirna district). After his father’s death in 1722 he attended the Annenschule in Dresden, where in 1734 he composed his earliest extant work, the cantata 'Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schild'. He sometimes stood in for the organist at the Annenkirche, J.G. Stübner, who was probably his organ teacher. On 14 May 1735 he matriculated at Leipzig University in law; a class report from the professor A. Kästner (16 September 1741) reads: ‘For three years the candidatus juris has availed himself of my praelectionum iudicarum and striven to master the fundamenta iuris. He has, however, always allowed music to be his main task’. At this time he also took lessons from Bach in composition and keyboard playing, as mentioned by J.A. Hiller (Lebensbeschreibungen, 1784) and confirmed by Forkel (Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke, 1802); he was probably also a pupil of, and assistant to, the organist at the Nikolaikirche, Johann Schneider. In 1741 Homilius applied unsuccessfully for the organist’s post of St Petri in Bautzen, submitting five chorale settings for organ of which two had obbligato parts for horn. His first post as organist was granted him in May 1742 by Dresden’s Frauenkirche, which possessed a new Silbermann organ. An application on 5 November 1753 for the post of organist at the Johanniskirche, Zittau, failed. On 10 May 1755, however, he was appointed Kantor at the Kreuzkirche in Dresden and teacher (Collega V) of the Kreuzschule (‘as he is skilled in Greek and all else, but is pre-eminent in music’), and at the same time music director of Dresden’s three principal churches – the Kreuzkirche, Frauenkirche and Sophienkirche; a month later the appointment was ratified by the Dresden town council. After the Kreuzkirche was destroyed in 1760 (during the Seven Years War), Homilius directed his activity mainly to the Frauenkirche. Tirelessly active until an advanced age, he composed a full yearly cycle of cantatas in the last years of his life, and in 1784 dedicated 12 Magnificat settings and a Latin motet (destroyed in World War II) to the Dresden council. He suffered a stroke in December of that year, and in the following March was retired.