1616–1667 · Germany · Baroque
Johann Jakob Froberger was a German composer, harpsichordist and organist, born in Stuttgart in 1616 and died in 1667. He travelled widely, studied in Rome with Frescobaldi and served as court organist in Vienna. He is remembered chiefly for his contribution to the keyboard suite: allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue became its fixed parts in his hands.
Froberger was born in Stuttgart in 1616. His father Basilius came from Halle: around 1599 he moved to Stuttgart, sang tenor in the Württemberg court chapel and in 1621 took charge of it as Kapellmeister. Basilius and his wife, born Schmid, had eleven children, and four of them became musicians; the other three brothers served at the Württemberg court in Stuttgart. Most likely Johann Jakob had his first music lessons from his father.
Little is known about exactly how he was taught. Johann Ulrich Steigleder is named among his possible teachers. The Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, certainly made life in Stuttgart harder, yet music in the city flourished in great variety, with musicians arriving from many countries. His father also kept a collection of over a hundred volumes of music, among them pieces by Samuel Scheidt, Michael Praetorius and Josquin des Prez. It probably helped the boy's education as well.
The Württemberg court chapel was dissolved in 1634, after the Protestant side lost the Battle of Nördlingen. Froberger moved to Vienna at about that time, though how he came to hold a singer's post in the imperial chapel there is unclear. In 1637 plague killed his father, mother and one of his sisters. Together with his brother Isaac, Johann Jakob sold the late Basilius's collection of music to the Württemberg court; that same year Froberger was appointed court organist in Vienna, working as an assistant to Wolfgang Ebner.
Then Froberger was granted leave and a stipend to study in Rome with Girolamo Frescobaldi. He spent three years in Italy: he made friends with Athanasius Kircher and Michelangelo Rossi and studied contemporary Italian music closely. As happened with a number of musicians studying there, he seemingly became a Catholic. In 1641 Froberger returned to Vienna.
In the autumn of 1645 he set out on a second trip to Italy. It was once thought that he studied with Giacomo Carissimi, but recent research suggests that his teacher in Rome was most probably Athanasius Kircher. Frescobaldi, his teacher in instrumental composition, had died in 1643. In 1649, on his way back, Froberger called at Florence and Mantua to demonstrate to the local princes the arca musurgica, a strong composing tool that Kircher had passed on to him. In September he showed it in Vienna to the Emperor, a passionate music lover, and gave him Libro Secondo, a collection of his own pieces.
After Empress Maria Leopoldine died in August 1649, the court's musical life came to a halt and Froberger left Vienna. For the next several years he travelled widely, and the Emperor probably entrusted him with diplomatic as well as musical errands. Dresden was apparently one of the first cities he visited: there he played at the court of the Elector John George I and presented him with a collection of his works. There too he met Matthias Weckmann, and the acquaintance grew into a lifelong friendship: the two wrote to each other, and Froberger even sent Weckmann some of his music to show his style.
In September 1649 Froberger played before the English diplomat William Swann. Through him he met Constantijn Huygens, who became his lifelong friend. Huygens also opened up to him the music of the French masters Ennemond Gaultier, Denis Gaultier and Jacques Champion de Chambonnières.
Froberger is known to have been in Brussels at least twice (1650 and 1652), and he also visited Antwerp and London. The trip to London went badly: he was robbed on the way and later portrayed the incident in the London lament, the Plainte faite à Londres. Paris became especially important: in 1652–1653 he gave concerts there and studied French music. He met the harpsichordist Louis Couperin and the lutenists Denis Gaultier, Dufaut and Blancrocher. The lutenists Gaultier and Dufaut wrote in a characteristic manner known as style brisé, a manner that left its mark on the harpsichord suites Froberger wrote afterwards. Couperin in turn absorbed a great deal from Froberger's manner; the subtitle of one of his unmeasured preludes states that it is written in imitation of him.
The lutenist Blancrocher died in November 1652 with Froberger present, reportedly in his arms. Tombeaux, musical epitaphs, for him were written by Froberger, Couperin, Gaultier and Dufaut.
In April 1653 Froberger returned to Vienna by way of Heidelberg, Nuremberg and Regensburg. He stayed with the Viennese court for the next four years and put together one more collection, the Libro Quarto, dated 1656. When Emperor Ferdinand III died on 2 April 1657, Froberger mourned him in music, writing a lamentation dedicated to his memory.
Relations between Froberger and Ferdinand's successor, Leopold I, were uneasy, for several political reasons. Nevertheless, he inscribed a further volume of his compositions to Leopold.
Little is known about Froberger's last years, and most of what is known comes from the correspondence between Constantijn Huygens and the dowager Duchess Sibylla. Froberger settled in a castle near Montbéliard, on land held by the dukes of Württemberg, where he taught and composed. He became the Duchess's music teacher and lived in her dower house.
According to the letters, Froberger went to Mainz in 1665, played at the Elector-Archbishop's court and there met Huygens face to face for the first time. In 1666 he was considering a return to the imperial court in Vienna, but so far as anyone knows he did not go back. Froberger died in May 1667. He apparently knew that he would die soon, and the day before he made all the necessary arrangements.
About thirty keyboard suites survive. In a typical Froberger suite the allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue became the standard movements, although the place of the gigue varied. In the earliest surviving autograph, the Libro Secondo, five of the six suites have three movements and no gigue, while in the suites of the Libro Quarto the gigue comes second. The familiar order with the gigue closing the suite first appeared only after the composer's death, in an Amsterdam edition of the 1690s.
Each dance has two repeated halves, yet the usual 8+8 bar pattern is rare; typically one half is longer or shorter than the other. His allemandes hardly follow the rhythm of the original dance and are packed with the brief gestures, ornaments and running passages of style brisé, a manner he carried over to the keyboard from French lute music. Some of the slow opening movements of the suites resemble unmeasured, improvisation-like preludes. The sixth suite of the Libro Secondo, a partita on the tune Mayerin, is a fairly popular piece of Froberger's, but it is clearly an early work, not comparable to the late suites in either technique or expression.
Froberger was one of the first composers to write programmatic pieces for the harpsichord. Among them are tombeaux and lamentations dedicated to the lutenist Blancrocher, to Emperor Ferdinand III and to his son Ferdinand IV. They contain musical images: Blancrocher's fall down the stairs is shown by a descending scale, and the ascent of Ferdinand IV's soul by an ascending one. He often added explanations to such pieces, sometimes very detailed ones: the allemande written while crossing the Rhine in a boat has 26 numbered passages, each with its own explanation. Among the frequently played pieces are the allemande from Suite No. 20 in D major, known as the Méditation sur ma mort future, and the Plainte faite à Londres from Suite No. 30.
Besides the suites, Froberger wrote toccatas, capriccios, canzonas, fantasias and ricercars. These pieces can be played on any keyboard instrument, including the organ. Free writing appears only in the toccatas, while most of the other pieces are strictly polyphonic. His fantasias and ricercars are practically the same: each piece usually has a single subject, which changes rhythmically from section to section. The canzonas and capriccios are built as variations in several sections, with faster and livelier subjects.
Of his vocal music only two motets are known, for three voices, two violins and basso continuo. Only two of Froberger's works were published in his lifetime: the Hexachord Fantasia (Rome, 1650) and a piece in the collection Fugues et caprices (Paris, 1660); the rest survives almost exclusively in manuscripts. In 2006 a manuscript, in all likelihood a late autograph, was found with 35 pieces, 18 of which had not been known before. Among those influenced by Froberger's compositions were Dieterich Buxtehude, Georg Böhm, Johann Pachelbel and J. S. Bach.