Musicians - Johann Jakob Froberger

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	Musicians - Johann Jakob Froberger

Johann Jakob Froberger (May 18, 1616 – May 7, 1667) was a German Baroque composer, keyboard virtuoso, and organist. He was very well known during his lifetime and modern scholars consider him to be one of the most important keyboard composers before Johann Sebastian Bach.

Life

Froberger was born in 1616 in Stuttgart and probably received first music lessons from his father. In 1634 he moved to Vienna and became court organist there in 1637. In the same year he went to Rome to study under Girolamo Frescobaldi. Froberger returned to Vienna in 1641 and remained there until 1657, frequently travelling to carry out diplomatic missions for Ferdinand III: he visited Brussels, Dresden, Antwerp, London, and, most importantly, Paris, where he lived for three years (1650-1653) and studied French style. After Ferdinand's death, Froberger went to Alsace where became a music teacher. He died in Héricourt in 1616.

Works and influence

Froberger composed numerous titled pieces in a programmatic and affective style, including lamentations on the deaths of the lutenist Blacrocher and Ferdinand III. (He represents Blacrocher's fatal fall down a flight stairs with a descending scale, and Ferdinand's ascent into heaven with an ascending one.) Approximately 35 keyboard suites, usually deemed most appropriate for performance on the clavichord, survive. Froberger also composed pieces which can successfully be played on either keyed instruments such as the harpsichord or clavichord, or the organ, in various polyphonic genres of the time, including toccatas, capriccios, canzonas, and fugue-like ricercars. Froberger did not apparently compose any vocal or religious music.

Froberger had a considerable influence on Dieterich Buxtehude, Georg Böhm, and Johann Pachelbel, as well as, to a certain degree, on Johann Sebastian Bach.

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