1660–1722 · Classical
Johann Kuhnau was born in Geising in 1660 and died in Leipzig in 1722. He worked as a composer, organist, lawyer and writer, and from 1701 he was cantor of the Thomaskirche, where Bach later succeeded him. He is best remembered for his keyboard sonatas on stories from the Bible.
Johann Kuhnau was born on 6 April 1660 in Geising, in what is now Saxony. His family was Protestant and came originally from Bohemia, and the name was then Kuhn. Much of what is known about his life comes from an autobiographical account that Johann Mattheson published in 1740 in his collection Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte.
The boy's gifts were clear from an early age, and about 1670 he was despatched to Dresden to learn from musicians of the court. For the next ten years he studied playing the keyboard and writing music, along with French and Italian. When a spreading wave of the Great Plague of Vienna arrived in Dresden in 1680, Kuhnau returned to his family home.
Once home, he continued his music studies at the Johanneum in Zittau, and after that took up law in Leipzig, at the university. As a student he wrote and performed a great deal. Back in Zittau he had met Christian Weise, the rector of the local gymnasium, and had supplied music for Weise's school plays; none of it survives.
In 1684 Kuhnau became organist of Leipzig's Thomaskirche, the church of St Thomas. He was 24 years old at the time.
Kuhnau finished his dissertation in 1688 and started a legal practice, yet he kept his organ post and went on composing. His first volume of keyboard pieces appeared in 1689; three further volumes came out in 1692, 1696 and 1700. He also married in 1689, and three daughters outlived him.
In the 1690s he rendered several Italian and French books into German, and in his free hours he studied further fields, among them mathematics, Hebrew and Greek. The decade also saw him complete the satirical Der musicalische Quack-Salber, his best-known novel, published in 1700. Two other satirical books by him are known as well, one from 1695 and one from 1698.
Kuhnau took over from Johann Schelle as Thomaskantor in 1701 and stayed in the post for the rest of his life. He additionally served as music director at Leipzig University. Running the church's numerous musical undertakings and giving lessons at the Thomasschule went well for him.
His health, however, began to fail. Competing musicians, including Georg Philipp Telemann and Kuhnau's former pupil Johann Friedrich Fasch, undermined his work as cantor as well.
Johann Kuhnau died in Leipzig on 5 June 1722, and Johann Sebastian Bach became Thomaskantor after him. Among those who studied with Kuhnau were Johann Friedrich Fasch, Johann David Heinichen and Christoph Graupner.
Kuhnau's nephew Johann Andreas Kuhnau, born at Annaberg on 1 December 1703, grew up to be among Bach's chief copyists. He was a pupil at the Thomasschule from 1718 and a student at Leipzig University from 1719.
Today Kuhnau is valued mainly for four keyboard collections issued between 1689 and 1700. The first two are the two parts of the Clavier-Übung, seven suites in each: all the suites of the first part are major, all of the second part minor. A suite nearly always starts with a prelude and moves through the standard dances, allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, with now and then a minuet or an aria in between. The second part has a Sonata in B-flat major appended; for some years scholars regarded it as the oldest keyboard sonata known, until later study showed it to be the first keyboard sonata printed in Germany.
Frische Clavier Früchte, the third collection, holds six sonatas patterned after Italian chamber sonatas. Of all his works it sold best during his lifetime, with five reprints, one of them posthumous. The final volume, Musicalische Vorstellung einiger biblischer Historien, goes by the name Biblical Sonatas. Its six sonatas each recount one story from the Bible over several contrasting movements, and the long preface sets out Kuhnau's thoughts on programme music. The score has trumpet calls, David's stone being thrown, and an Israelite prayer built on a Luther chorale.
A large part of Kuhnau's vocal music has not survived, among it the opera Orpheus and the Markus-Passion. Harmony and melody in the surviving cantatas are modest, though the music is expressive. The site has three numbers from a Christmas cantata, Uns ist ein Kind geboren (BWV 142): Uns ist ein Kind geboren: 4. Coro and Uns ist ein Kind geboren: 8. Choral at an elementary level, and Uns ist ein Kind geboren: 2. Coro at an intermediate level.
Kuhnau also wrote books and theoretical treatises. The satirical novel Der musicalische Quack-Salber follows an invented German trickster passing himself off as an Italian virtuoso; it also tells us a great deal about how music was performed at the end of the seventeenth century. Only one manuscript preserves the treatise Fundamenta compositionis, while Tractatus de tetrachordo and De triade harmonica are known by name only.