Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739)
- Concerto (in Re maggiore) per il Flauto Traverso (c.1731)
Performers: Maurice Steger (traverso); Musica Antiqua Köln; Reinhard Goebel (conductor)
Further info: Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739) - Der hochmütige gestürtzte und wieder erhabene Croesus (1710)
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German composer. He was the son of Gottfried Keiser (? - before 1732),
an organist and composer, and Agnesa Dorothea von Etzdorff (1657-1732),
who had married only four months before his birth. The elder Keiser
seems to have lost or given up his position as organist at Teuchern in
1674 or 1675 and departed, leaving his wife and two sons behind. On 13
July 1685 Keiser enrolled at the Thomasschule, Leipzig, for seven years,
and it was there presumably that he received his principal musical
education, studying under Johann Schelle and perhaps Johann Kuhnau.
Mattheson observed, however, that he owed his composing skill almost
entirely to natural ability and the study of the best Italian music.
After leaving the Thomasschule, Keiser probably soon made his way to
Brunswick, where the court opera was flourishing under the leadership of
Johann Kusser; by 1694 he had obtained an appointment as
‘Cammer-Componist’. His opera Procris und Cephalus, on a text by the
court poet F.C. Bressand, was performed in Brunswick that year, while
another opera, Basilius, was done in Hamburg. Between 1695 and 1698
Keiser produced five more operas for the Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel court,
all with Bressand, but in 1696 or 1697 he moved to Hamburg as Kusser’s
successor at the Opera. There he found one of his most sympathetic
literary collaborators in C.H. Postel, with whom he wrote eight operas,
including Adonis (1697), Janus (1698) and the lost Iphigenia (1699).
Beginning in 1703 Keiser also tried his hand at managing the opera
house, in partnership with a literary man named Drüsicke. According to
Mattheson their administration got off to a good start but was soon
beset by financial difficulties, at least partly precipitated by riotous
living by Keiser and his friends. In spring 1704 the theatre was
temporarily closed, and Keiser left briefly for Weissenfels, where he
gave the first performance of his Almira, originally intended for
Hamburg.
Drüsicke apparently passed on the Almira libretto to the youthful
Handel, a member of the opera orchestra, who scored a great success with
his own setting in January 1705, leading to strained relations between
the two composers that no doubt contributed to Handel’s decision shortly
afterwards to leave for Italy. Octavia (1705), Keiser’s first opera
after returning from Weissenfels, inaugurated an important series of
eight historical dramas with librettos by Barthold Feind. Following the
final collapse of his administration in 1707, Keiser appears to have
absented himself from the opera house for more than a year, passing much
of his time visiting the estates of noble friends. He may not have
participated in the highly successful première of Der Carneval von
Venedig in summer 1707, and he composed no new work for 1708. Whatever
rift may have existed between him and the new director, J.H. Sauerbrey,
seems to have been healed by 1709, and his dominance over the Hamburg
repertory became more complete than ever. In 1721 he may have conducted a
performance of Tomyris in Durlach before returning to Hamburg, where
his arrival was celebrated on 9 August with a performance of his
oratorio Der siegende David. In 1725 and 1726, while Telemann composed
relatively little for that theatre, Keiser turned out five major new
works, two revised versions, and parts of two intermezzos. On 2 December
1728 Keiser succeeded Mattheson as Kantor of Hamburg Cathedral, an
important post which nonetheless brought him meagre remuneration. He
never again composed a wholly new opera, though he did revise Croesus in
1730. His diminished productivity probably had less to do with the
demands of his ecclesiastical duties than with the increasingly sorry
state of the Hamburg Opera, which finally closed its doors in 1738.
After the death of his wife in 1735, he ‘found reason’ (in Mattheson’s
words) ‘to remain completely in retirement’ until his own death four
years later.
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