Marianus Königsperger (1708-1769)
- Concerto ex G à Organo principale (1754)
Performers: Hеrbеrt Wаlti (organ); Thurgаuеr Barockensemble
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German composer. The son of an instrument maker, he went to the
Benedictine abbey of Prüfening as a choirboy. His talent for music
proved so great that he abandoned the study of theology in its favour;
having entered the Benedictine order, he became organist and choirmaster
at Prüfening in 1734, a post he retained for the rest of his life. On
entering Prüfening he took the name Marianus, renouncing his baptismal
names Johann Erhard which he never used in connection with his musical
activities. From 1740 until his death he produced a steady stream of
publications, most of which were church music, but which also included
symphonies and keyboard pieces. With the considerable profits from the
sale of nearly 40 publications Königsperger was able to finance not only
the building of a new choir organ for Prüfening, but also the
improvement of the main organ, the purchase of books for the abbey
library and the publication of scholarly works by his fellow monks.
Königsperger was one of the most popular and prolific composers of his
generation in south Germany, and his music had a very wide circulation.
The Augsburg publisher J.J. Lotter, who issued most of his works,
described them as the foundation stone of his firm’s prosperity, and
Königsperger was said to have done more than any other composer to
improve musical standards in Bavarian village churches. His popularity
seems to have been widespread and unusually long-lasting; the last of
Lotter’s printed music catalogues, of 1820, lists a Missa pastoritia of
his, when the church music of his contemporaries had long been out of
print. He also had a considerable local reputation as an organist.
Königsperger belongs to the second generation of composers to write in
the 18th-century Bavarian church style. This style, to be found in
countless publications of liturgical music for parish choirs with
limited resources, was largely developed by J.V. Rathgeber in his
publications of 1721–36. Its chief characteristics were compactness
combined with liturgical propriety, tunefulness, non-contrapuntal choral
writing and simple solo parts. The normal scoring was solo SATB,
chorus, two violins and basso continuo, with optional trumpets and
drums. By the mid-1740s the style was beginning to develop in two
directions. Some composers began to write more elaborate music, for
well-equipped town or monastery churches; those more concerned with the
average rural parish church simplified the style even further. In much
of his music Königsperger seemed uncertain which of these lines to
follow, and in many ways his earliest publications, in which his style
is most homogeneous, are his best. The vesper psalms of op.5 show his
gift for writing good, broad melodies for chorus as well as soloists,
and for applying ritornello principles to a through-composed psalm
setting. In his psalms of 1750 the melodic gift is less conspicuous, the
sense of form and balance less assured. Expansive settings of the first
few verses are often followed by a dull, perfunctory alla breve tutti,
in which the different voices sing different words simultaneously as was
common in the Gloria and Credo sections of contemporary missa brevis
settings; he made comparatively little use of ritornello techniques, and
the touches of word-painting occasionally to be found in the 1743
psalms are absent.
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